For our August “Community Choice” Project of the Month, the community elected NAS4Free, an embedded Storage distribution for Windows, Mac, & UNIX-like systems. The NAS4Free Team shared their thoughts about the project’s history, purpose, and direction.
SourceForge (SF): Tell me about the NAS4Free project please.
NAS4Free Team: NAS4Free is designed to be a NAS (Network Attached Storage) system. Lots of systems drag in marginally connected services and try to make them more marketable to mass consumers, but instead make themselves very large or non-responsive. NAS4Free capitalizes on trying to do the few things it does in an expert manner. NAS4Free is the simplest and fastest way to create a centralized and easily accessible server for all kinds of data, with all kinds of network protocols, and across networks.
SF: What made you start this?
NAS4Free Team: NAS4Free started with FreeNAS in 2005. When the FreeNAS brand name was legally acquired by iXsystems in late 2011, it was necessary to carry on the project under another name. In March of 2012, we released NAS4Free’s first release. A good quantity of the base system was upgraded.
NAS4Free took FreeNAS from FreeBSD 7 to FreeBSD 9.x releases, allowing support for a lot of newer hardware and great advances in the ZFS file system. Also there was a strong demand from the community to keep this NAS OS going forward, as it itself has proven over so many years in the NAS world, and to end users.
SF: Has the original vision been achieved?
NAS4Free Team: Mostly yes. The goal was to continue the concepts and traditions of FreeNAS before the necessary name change. That core set of sensibilities has mostly been retained.
SF: Who can benefit the most from your project?
NAS4Free Team: More and more business and personal data gets stored by people all over the world. With the increasing capacity of hard drives (over 10Tb in 2016) a lot of valuable data is at risk or even lost in seconds in case of a hard drive failure.
A first step to avoid data loss is to backup data using an online cloud service until users recognise possible security risks and experience performance or availability issues when trying to access their data. Deleting data in a cloud does not mean that data has been really deleted, recently such a service restored the data of a user which he deleted over 7 years ago: http://www.pcmag.com/news/351256/dropbox-bug-restores-deleted-files-7-years-later.
Here is where the power of NAS4Free can help. NAS4Free is the solution to allow the sharing of data over a network or internet. It can be used for media playback, for syncing data between devices like your tablet or your smartphone or even for hosting your own virtual machines.
NAS4Free can be installed on virtually any hardware platform.
The number of potential users is fairly limitless. NAS4Free is used by many people at home, in SoHo and in enterprise environments.
With NAS4Free you are in full control of your data!
SF: What core need does NAS4Free fulfill?
NAS4Free Team: The major goal of the NAS4Free project is to provide a stable, reliable and secure platform for data storage and file sharing across the entire network.
SF: What’s the best way to get the most out of using NAS4Free?
NAS4Free Team: Don’t expect “extra” non-related NAS services. It isn’t a SQL server. It isn’t a Usenet downloader but installing it on a more modern machine, with some CPU power and enough RAM, will increase its performance greatly.
SF: What has your project team done to help build and nurture your community?
NAS4Free Team: The IRC channel is active and so is our forum. The Wiki sees updates fairly regularly. Previous support contributors have set up sites that help keep and retain useful questions and answers. Most of all, the project has generally stuck to the priorities and traditions that made FreeNAS so popular among its users.
SF: Have you all found that more frequent releases helps build up your community of users?
NAS4Free Team: Some users don’t care about frequent updates at all, they update now and then, and that’s OK. Others love seeing frequent updates because they’re curious about what has changed or want to keep their system fully updated, since some boxes are also connected to the Internet. It is a bit of a balancing act sometimes.
SF: What was the first big thing that happened for your project?
NAS4Free Team: The name change from FreeNAS to NAS4Free was pretty significant. All the new technology that the new version of FreeBSD pulled in made a giant jump from the old FreeNAS system. And setting up a new forum and all the webpages took some time, since most pages were setup from scratch or had to be rewritten.
SF: What helped make that happen?
NAS4Free Team: Bifurcation – a lot of developers either went to FreeNAS (with iXsystems) or quit entirely. That cut out a lot of the bureaucracy that occurs with projects that have a lot of developers. A lot of good ideas, many user driven, helped us make some great forward progress.
SF: What was the net result for that event?
NAS4Free Team: The core concepts and traditions were respected as much as possible. In the process, the total capabilities of the system jumped rapidly forward.
SF: What is the next big thing for NAS4Free?
NAS4Free Team: A number of good concepts and traditions are being adhered to and changing a lot of “big things” really isn’t something that is considered very often. However, with 32bit hardware rapidly expiring, 32bit builds will sooner or later be something that is phased out.
SF: How long do you think that will take?
NAS4Free Team: Expiring 32-bit builds could happen immediately, but we think that the 10.x versions are probably the last 32-bits versions we will make. The main 32-bit target (Netburst, Pentium4, and Celeron D) processors were replaced after 2007. We believe that 10 years is enough time to replace older machines.
SF: Do you have the resources you need to make that happen?
NAS4Free Team: Yes. It will actually save some resources and time for us not having to build 32-bit versions.
SF: If you had it to do over again, what would you do differently for NAS4Free?
NAS4Free Team: If it were possible to change time, it would be nice to be able to keep the FreeNAS name. But, the name changes may have been serendipity, as it was a catalyst for change that may have been necessary at the time.
SF: Why?
NAS4Free Team: Keeping the FreeNAS name would have kept the whole community together. The past split fractured the community. Now there are plenty of anti-other zealots on both sides. But this is something we’ve tried to avoid.
SF: Any reason you can’t do that now?
NAS4Free Team: FreeNAS and NAS4Free now represent different sides of the same coin in regard to how a NAS should work. Trying to rectify the two, and worse trying to rectify the communities that have clearly taken up sides, at this point is fairly impossible.
SF: Is there anything else we should know?
NAS4Free Team: Even with a little smaller user support base, we’ve found that sometimes the best ideas come from some of the least expected people.
Perfect NAS software, it really is for who don’t know it!
Good to see them project of the month now, but for me they really are project of every year 🙂
Definitely the best NAS currently available. Too many NAS systems try to include way too many things and then start suffering from feature creep and feature bloat. NAS4Free has generally done a good job of avoiding that fate, and does a good job if being memory and CPU efficient as a result.
No. It definitely IS NOT an “all in one” solution. And that’s a good thing. It’s storage. That’s all. And that’s a good thing.