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Sounds like NFS might still be the way to go for you.
For backups personally I use Restic and connect over SFTP via SSH, since that's just built in and doesn't need any configuration.
For more traditional file sharing I use WebDAV with SFTPGo, since I need windows and android compatibility too, and webdav is pretty easy to setup and use.
And I also use Syncthing for keeping some directories in sync between devices.
I have SFTPgo in a docker container with attached storage. Can access it through many protocols, but on linux I mount it via WebDav.
Whats neat is that I can also share files/folders with either other registered users or with a password or download only link and it has a web gui for that.
Everyone forgets about WebDAV.
It's a little jank, but it does work on Windows. If you copy a file in, it doesn't show up in the file manager until you refresh. But it works.
It's also multithreaded, which isn't the case for SMB. This is especially good if you host it on SSDs.
I use both samba and NFS (with freebsd) on the same disk for my freebsd, linux and win7 desktop machine. All works perfectly fine.
I'm running an rsync daemon for large transfers and use copyparty for easily grabbing files on phones etc.
If it's for backup, zfs and btrfs can send incremental diffs quite efficiently (but of course you'll have to use those on both ends).
Otherwise, both NFS and SMB are certainly viable.
I tried both but TBH I ended up just using SSHFS because I don't care about becoming and NFS/SMB admin.
NFS and SMB are easy enough to setup, but then when you try to do user-level authentication... they aren't as easy anymore.
Since I'm already managing SSH keys all over my machines, I feel like SSHFS makes much more sense for me.
I think a reasonable quorum already said this, but NFS is still good. My only complaint is it isn't quite as user-mountable as some other systems.
So...I know you said no SAMBA, but SAMBA 4 really isn't bad any more. At least, not nearly as shit as it was.
If you want a easily mountable filesystem for users (e.g. network discovery/etc.) it's pretty tolerable.
NFS is the best option if you only need to access the shared drives over your LAN. If you want to mount them over the internet, there's SSHFS.
See, this is interesting. I'm out here looking for the new shiny easy button, but what I'm hearing is "the old config-file based thing works really well. ain't broken, etc."
I may give that a swing and see.
I'm at the same age - just to mention, samba is nowhere near the horror show it used to be. That said, I use NFS for my Debian boxes and mac mini build box to hit my NAS, samba for the windows laptop.
I've run Proxmox hosts with smb shares for literally a decade without issue. Performance is line speed now. Only issues I've ever had were operator error and that was a long time ago. SMB 3 works great.
Yeah, Samba has come a long way. I run a Linux based server but all clients are Windows or Android so it just makes sense to run SMB shares instead of NFS.
Same. I've used SMB for years. Don't have any problems with it across all my Windows and Android devices. Pretty sure I had an iPad in there at one point as well.
I've always had weird issues with SMB like ghost files, issues with case sensitivity (zfs pool), it dropping out and me having to reboot to re-establish the connection... Since switching to Linux and using NFS, it's been almost indistinguishable from a native drive for my casual use (including using a ssd pool as a steam library...)
I can definitely say in the past I had similar experiences. I haven't really had any problems with SMB in the last 5 years that I can recall. It really was a shit show back in the day, but it's been rock solid for me anyway.
What about NFS over the internet?
You can use NFS over the internet, but it will be a lot more work to secure it. It was intended for use over a LAN and performance may not be great over the internet, especially with high latency or packet loss.
I would just create a point to point VPN connection and run it over that (for axample an IPsec tunnel using strongswan)
I agree, NFS is eazy peazy, livin greazy.
I have an old ds211j synology for backup. I just can't bring myself to replace it, it still works. However, it doesn't support zfs. I wish I could get another Linux running on this thing.
However, NFS does work on it and is so simple and easy to lock down, it works in a ton of corner cases like mine.
NFS is easy as long as you use very basic access control. When you want NFSv4 with Kerberos auth you're entering a world of pain and tears.
I don't use access control, I lock down with networking and filters.
Afaik Synology supports Btrfs which I honestly prefer at this point if you don't need filesystem based encryption or professionall scaling and caching features.
The ds211j is on synology DSM 6, which is ancient. I'll look again, but I don't think it supports btrfs.
The lower end Synology NAS (like my DS420j) don’t support btrfs. They only support ext4, I think.
I still have to use SAMBA as Win 11 hates NFS with a passion and we have Win 11 boxes here supplied as work machines so no changing. Also wifeys gaming rig is Windows as she don't want to mess around getting stuff to work...
But hey - for everything else it is NFS with all of its weirdness, but it just works a bit better than SMB
My Windows machines seem to be just fine with the couple of NFS shares I use for easier cross-platform mounting on boot. It comes at the cost of some security, though, so I use it to share unimportant stuff I want to mount very freely, like some media libraries. I use SMB for the rest.
I'm curious, what's the issue with NFS on Windows for you?
Oh it just doesn't like it as much as SMB... has work mandated VPN on it for starters! I use a truenas box for most of the backups etc. and I just share the same dataset via SMB and NFS and locally only, so it is sorted, but NFS on the Win 11 box is just way flakier and drops often
If you already know NFS and it works for you, why change it? As long as you’re keeping it between Linux machines on the LAN, I see nothing wrong with NFS.
Isn’t nfs pretty much completely insecure unless you turn on nfs4 with Kerberos? The fact that that is such a pain in the ass is what keeps me from it. It is fine for read-only though.
It is, but nfsv3 is extremely easy to configure. You need to edit 1 line in 1 file and it's ready to go.
If you’ve got Tailscale it’ll build WireGuard tunnels directly over the LAN: I actually do this with Samba for Time Machine backups on macOS.
Obviously the big bonus is being able to do the same over the internet without the gaping security holes.
(I used to use split DNS so that my LAN’s router’s DNS server returned the LAN IP, and Tailscale’s DNS server returned the Tailscale IP. But because I’m a privacy geek I decided to make it Tailscale-only.)
Would be fine for designated storage networks that use IP whitelists.
Other than that, you kind of need user specific encryption/segregation (which I beliege Kerberos does?)
For all its flaws and mess, NFS is still pretty good and used in production.
I still use NFS to file share to my VMs because it still significantly outperforms virtiofs, and obviously network is a local bridge so latency is non-existent.
The thing with rsync is that it's designed to quickly compute the least amount of data transfer to sync over a remote (possibly high latency) link. So when it comes to backups, it's literally designed to do that easily.
The only cool new alternative I can think of is, use btrfs or ZFS and btrfs/zfs send | ssh backup btrfs/zfs recv which is the most efficient and reliable way to backup, because the filesystem is aware of exactly what changed and can send exactly that set of changes. And obviously all special attributes are carried over, hardlinks, ACLs, SELinux contexts, etc.
The problem with backups over any kind of network share is that if you're gonna use rsync anyway, the latency will be horrible and take forever.
Of course you can also mix multiple things: rsync laptop to server periodically, then mount the server's backup directory locally so you can easily browse and access older stuff.
For smaller folders I like using syncthing, that way it's like having multiple updated backups
Syncthing is neat, but you shouldn't consider it to be a backup solution. If you accidentally delete or modify a file on one machine, it'll happily propagate that change to all other machines.
I like this solution because I can have the need filled without a central server. I use old-fashioned offline backups for my low-churn, bulk data, and SyncThing for everything else to be eventually consistent everywhere.
If my data was big enough so as to require dedicated storage though, I'd probably go with TrueNAS.
I'd use an s3 bucket with s3fs. Since you want to host it yourself, Minio is the open-source tool to use instead of s3.
I hear good things about seaweedfs instead of minio these days
Oh, and if you want to use it as the backing store for a database consider obstore instead of s3fs: https://developmentseed.org/blog/2025-08-01-obstore/
For linux only, lan only shared drive NFS is probably the easiest you'll get, it's made for that usecase.
If you want more of a dropbox/onedrive/google drive experience, Syncthing is really cool too, but that's a whole other architecture qhere you have an actual copy on all machines.
I use sshfs.
LAN or internet?
Https is king for internet protocols.
LAN only. I may set up a VPN connection one day but it's not currently a priority. (edited post to reflect)
NFS works, but http was designed for shitty internet. Keep that in mind. Owncloud or similar might be a good idea.
Check out SyncThing, which can sync a folder of your choice across all 3 devices
[edit] oops, just saw you don't plan on using it
In that case, if you use KDE, you can use Dolphin to set up network drives to your local network machines through SSH
truenas is cool. I've only used core so far, but i hear scale is taking over
this looks promising. Seems a little heavy-weight at first glance... How was it to get up and running?
It's heavy and it doesn't like if you tinker with the box in Non-TrueNAS ways. In the end it's a convenient shiny gui for ZFS and NFS. But it (or ZFS) needs some RAM (minimum 8 I think), so I'm not sure about it working on your old laptop.
the GUI makes it pretty painless. it was my first real attempt at self hosting anything, my first experience with any kind of NFS/SMB setup at all. i was running it as bare metal for around 2 years before using installing as a vm on proxmox.
TrueNas is pretty top notch and offers a variety of storage and protocol options. If you're at all familiar with Linux style OS, it should be pretty easy to work with. Setting up storage comes with a little bit of a learning curve, but it's not too bad. This SAN/NAS OS is polished, performant, and extensible. If you're not planning on using SMB or Samba, you can most certainly use NFS, or iSCSI if that's your thing.