ronmaide

1. Yes. In the TrueNAS UI you can configure users and groups. You can add users to common groups and set the permissions of the share to allow for group read/write. If all of the clients are on Windows, I wanna say you can set permissions on the share via Windows Explorer which will allow you to make more granular permission changes.

2. I forget exactly because I only briefly used TrueNAS in this capacity, but there was a community repo you need to add for more apps than the default. I think I remember the default repo having Emby but not Jellyfin, or vice-versa. Someone may be able to help me remember the name of the repo in the comments.

3. Set up the app as normal for local access and just forward the port from your router to the IP of your TrueNAS instance. There wasn’t anything tricky you need to do beyond a regular installation.

So—I will preface this by saying I’d also love for an alternative to Nextcloud that’s faster and more reliable.

For the combo of FileBrowser and Joplin—I used Joplin a bunch in the past so I’m relatively familiar with it, but it’s also been a while and things may have changed—how is it syncing? I seem to remember hooking it up through WebDAV to sync—is that (still?) the case? If so, does that mean that FileBrowser is also exposing a WebDAV server in addition to the HTTP server? Is FileBrowser doing any cross-device syncing at all, or is it as it appears on the surface—just exposing a folder via a URL that you can send/retrieve files from?

The one thing I’d caution with Joplin, and what ultimately pushed me away from it was the portability of the data within it—I didn’t love that I wasn’t ultimately just working with a folder of Markdown, which led me to Obsidian—but don’t let my preferences dissuade you—the best system is the one that works for you—just more of a heads up since at least a few years back the export process was a bit of a pain to get things in a “vanilla” state.

Are you testing that the ports are open with your phone on a cellular network and not WiFi within the same network? Your router may be doing a loop back NAT which “forwards” the ports internally but isn’t necessarily forwarding the ports externally.

Did you change ISPs at all? I think I read that the router was new—is it a router/modem combo? If the ISP has changed it’s possible the new one doesn’t allow traffic on those ports, which is the case for my ISP. No amount of forwarding rules will change that.

If you have a separate modem/gateway and router it’s possible there are firewall rules on the device closer to the WAN in which case you may need to ask your ISP if they can put the modem in “pass through mode” in order to allow the traffic. That’s probably not the technical term for it—I think behind the scenes they either just disable the firewall or put the router address into DMZ, but that description has worked with me in the past with L1 support for them to know what I’m trying to accomplish.

HGST personally, because my failure count over time for those drives has been in the single digits through ~60 drives in around 15 years, though every manufacturer is going to have missteps or failures. I can say I've had bad experiences with Toshiba, but I'm sure you can find someone who swears by them also. Ultimately my anecdotal evidence in either direction is an unreliable crystal ball you should take with a grain of salt.

The suggestion to check Backblaze reports is great, but I'd also recommend to vary your manufacturers if you're able and instead build your storage solution with the assumption that drives are "wear units" and will fail. If you have some redundancy built in where you're able to tolerate the failure of one (or ideally multiple) drive failures without losing data, then even though the question still matters, it matters a bit less.