Free NAS Setup Guide

Know What "Free" Covers Before You Start

The software in this guide is TrueNAS, and its Community Edition is genuinely free — no licence and no subscription for the pools, shares, users and snapshots built below. The company behind it sells business systems and support, which is how the free edition exists.

But free software still runs on physical things, so count the real costs once, before you start:

• Drives — the storage itself. Two decent hard drives are the one purchase that matters.
• Electricity — a NAS runs day and night. An efficient old PC costs little; a thirsty gaming rig costs noticeably more. Measure it, do not guess.
• Your time — one evening to build, a few minutes a month to look after.

Install TrueNAS on a Small Boot SSD

Download the TrueNAS installer from the official TrueNAS website (truenas.com), write it to a pen drive, and boot the old PC from it. Choose Install, and select a small SSD as the boot drive — not one of your storage drives. The system disk stays separate, so it can be replaced later without touching your data. A pen drive makes a poor permanent boot disk; they wear out quietly.

During the install, set a strong password for the admin account and note it down somewhere safe, offline. Restart, and note the IP address shown on the PC's screen — the web interface lives at that address. In the video it is:

http://192.168.1.50

Your own NAS may show a different address — always use the one on your screen.

Create the Storage Pool — the Foundation

Open the web interface, go to Storage and create a pool from your storage drives. Give it a simple name — in the video the pool is named tank. With two drives, choose a mirror: both drives hold the same data, so one can die and nothing is lost. With three or more, RAIDZ1 spreads the data with one drive of safety.

Take your time here. The pool layout is the one decision that is painful to change later — and a single drive means no safety at all: the day it dies, everything on it is gone.

Make Datasets and Share Them over SMB

Inside the pool, make one dataset per job — for example Media, Documents, Backups. Then share each one over SMB so Windows and Mac treat it like a normal folder: Sharing → Windows Shares (SMB) → Add, and point the share at the dataset. Under Services, make sure the SMB service is on and set to start automatically.

On a Windows PC, open File Explorer and type the NAS address and share name in the address bar — in the video:

\\192.168.1.50\Media

Use your own NAS address and your own share name in place of the example.

Give Every Person Their Own User Account

The admin account is for managing the NAS, not for daily file access — never share the admin login. Under Credentials → Users, create a separate user for each person, with their own password. On each dataset, set the permissions: who can read, who can write, and who sees nothing at all.

Turn On Snapshots — the Undo Button

Snapshots are TrueNAS quietly saving the state of a folder at set times. A deleted file, a wrong edit, even a folder encrypted by malware can be rolled back to yesterday in minutes. Set them up under Data Protection → Periodic Snapshot Tasks → Add: pick the datasets that change often, schedule them daily (hourly for busy office folders), and set a lifetime of two to four weeks — a good home starting point. Snapshots cost only the space of what changed.

Keep One Backup Outside the NAS

The honest finish, stated plainly: a NAS is not a backup by itself. A mirror or RAIDZ pool survives a drive failure — nothing more. Deletion, ransomware that reaches the NAS, a dead power supply, fire or theft can take the whole box and everything in it at once, and no pool layout protects against that.

So keep at least one copy of what matters outside the NAS — an external drive stored somewhere else, or a cloud copy — and test restoring a file from it once, so you know it works. That outside copy is part of the real cost counted in Step 1, and it is the step that decides whether a bad day is an inconvenience or a disaster.