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.

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.

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.

For smaller folders I like using syncthing, that way it's like having multiple updated backups

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.

I use sshfs.

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.

NFS is still the standard. Were slowly seeing better adoption of VFS for things like hypervisors.

Otherwise something like SFTPgo or Copyparty if you want a solution that supports pretty much every protocol.

truenas is cool. I've only used core so far, but i hear scale is taking over

NFS is pretty good

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

I use NFS for linking VMs and Docker containers to my file server. Haven't tried it for desktop usage, but I imagine it would work similarly.

LAN or internet?

Https is king for internet protocols.

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.

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.

I still use sshfs. I can't be bothered to set up anything else I just want something that works out of the box.