A year ago I built a NAS to reduce my reliance on cloud services, and set up an arr stack. I went with TrueNAS Scale, which was on Bluefin at the time. In the past 12 months, TrueNAS Scale has been through FOUR major OS versions, with a fifth already announced. At least one of those involved a release train switch so, despite diligently checking for updates in the dashboard, I was left in the dust with an obsolete OS, and didn’t find out until it was already a huge hassle to upgrade.
I’ve been really happy with the utility and benefit of having this tool, but holy smokes how is anybody supposed to keep up with all of this? This is far from my only hobby, and I simply do not have the time, patience, or interest for a constant race to keep up with vetting new release versions and fixing what breaks every 3 weeks. I have enough tinkering hobbies as it is.
On top of that, there’s the whole blow up with TrueCharts, which has also left me with an entire suite of obsolete albatrosses around my NAS that I need to deal with. Am I still waiting for them to figure out an upgrade path? I don’t even know anymore.
Sorry for the rant, but I guess what I’m looking for is: how do you keep up with the constant maintenance and updates, and where do I go from here, in February 2025, with a system running Bluefin 22.12, a 32TB ZFS pool (RAIDZ1) that has to remain intact, and a handful of TrueCharts apps that I don’t want to lose the data from (e.g. Jellyfin configs/watch history)?
I’ve encountered that before with Watchtower updating parts of a serrvice and breaking the whole stack. But automating a stack update, as opposed to a service update, should mitigate all of that. I’ll include a system prune in the script.
Most of my stacks are stable so aside from breaking changes I should be fine. If I hit a breaking change, I keep backups, I’ll rebuild and update manually. I think that’ll be a net time save over all.
I keep two docker lxcs, one for arrs and one for everything else. I might make a third lxc for things that currently require manual updates. Immich is my only one currently.
Glad it works for you.
Automatic updates of software with potential breaking changes scares me. I’m not familiar with watchtower, since I don’t use it or anything like it, but I have several services that I don’t use very often, but would suck if they silently stopped working properly.
When I think of a service, I think of something like Nextcloud, Immich, etc, even if they consist of multiple containers. For example, I have a separate containers for libre office online and Nextcloud, but I upgrade them together. I don’t want automated upgrades of either because I never know if future builds will be compatible. So I go update things when I remember, but I make sure everything works after.
That said, it seems watchtower can be used to merely notify, so maybe I’ll use it for that. I certainly want to be around for any automatic updates though.