Selfhosted

As a general rule: One system, one service. That system can be metal, vm, or container. Keeping things isolated makes maintenance much easier. Though sometimes it makes sense to break the rules. Just do so for the right reasons and not out of laziness.

Your file server should be it's own hardware. Don't make that system do anything else. Keeping it simple means it will be reliable.

Proxmox is great for managing VMs. Your could start with one server, and add more as needed to a cluster.

It's easy enough to setup wireguard for roaming systems that you should. Make a VM for your VPN endpoint and off you go.

I'm a big fan of automation. Look into ansible and terraform. At least consider ansible for updating all your systems easily - that way you're more likely to do it often.

Just fyi - running TrueNAS with zfs as a VM under Proxmox is a recipe for disaster, as me how I know.

Zfs needs direct drive access, with VMs, the hypervisor virtualizes the adapter which is then passed through, which can mess things up.

What you'd need to do is buy a sata/sas card and pass the whole card through, then you can use a vm.

I need everything to be fully but securely accessible from outside the network

I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. Who is going to need to access it from outside the network? Is it good enough for you to set up a VPN?

The more stuff visible on the internet, the more you have to play IT to keep it safe. Personally, I don't have time for that. The safest and easiest system to maintain a system is one where possible connections are minimized.

My best advice is use that your old setup hasn't died yet while you can. I.e. start now and setup Proxmox because it's vastly superior to TrueNAS for the more general type hardware you have and then run a more focused NAS project like Openmediavault in a proxmox VM.

My recommendation, from experience, would be to setup a VM for anything touching hardware directly, like a NAS or Jellyfin (if you want to have GPU assisted transcoding) and I personally find it smoothest to run all my Docker containers from one Docker dedicated VM. LXCs are popular for some but I strongly dislike how you set hardware allocations for them, and running all Docker containers in one LXC is just worse than doing it in a VM. My future approach will be to move to more dedicated container setup as opposed to the VM focused proxmox but that is another topic.

I also strongly recommend using portainer or similar to get a good overview of your containers and centralize configuration management.

As for external access all I can say is do be careful. Direct internet exposure is likely a really bad idea unless you know what you're doing and trust the project you expose. Hiding access behind a VPN is fairly easy if your router has a VPN server built in. And WireGuard (like Netbird / tailscale / Cloudflare tunnels etc all use) is great if not.

As for authentication it's pretty tricky but well worth it and imo needed if you want to expose stuff to friends/family. I recommend Authentik over other alternatives.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

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