So, I understand this is Ian only, I will leave out NextCloud.

I would personally say Ceph. This is a storage solution meant to be spread among a bunch of different hosts. Basically, it operates on RAID 5 principles AND replicated storage.

Personal setup: single host 12 ea. 10TB HDDs.

To start, it does go ahead and generates the parity data for the storage bucket. On top of that, I am running a X2 replicated bucket. Now since I am running a single host, this data is replicated amongst OSDs(read HDDs), but in a multiple host cluster it would be replicated amongst multiple hosts instead.

One of the benefits to an array like this is that other types of services are easily implemented. NFS overall is pretty good, and it is possible to implement that through the UI or command line. I understand that Samba is not your favorite, but that is also possible. Personally, I am using Rados to connect my Apache Cloudstack hypervisor.

I will admit, it is not the easiest to set up, but using docker containers to manage storage is an interesting concept. On top of that, you can designate different HDDs to different pools, perhaps you want your solid state storage to be shared separately. Ceph is also capable of monitoring your HDDs with smartctl.

Proper installation does give you a web UI to manage it, if some one of your skill even needs it. ;)

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.

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

NFS is still useful. We use it in production systems now. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

And if you have a dedicated system for this, I’d look into TrueNAS Scale.

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.

NFS is really good inside a LAN, just use 4.x (preferably 4.2) which is quite a bit better than 2.x/3.x. It makes file sharing super easy, does good caching and efficient sync. I use it for almost all of my Docker and Kubernetes clusters to allow files to be hosted on a NAS and sync the files among the cluster. NFS is great at keeping servers on a LAN or tight WAN in sync in near real time.

What it isn't is a backup system or a periodic sync application and it's often when people try to use it that way that they get frustrated. It isn't going to be as efficient in the cloud if the servers are widely spaced across the internet. Sync things to a central location like a NAS with NFS and then backups or syncs across wider WANs and the internet should be done with other tech that is better with periodic, larger, slower transactions for applications that can tolerate being out of sync for short periods.

The only real problem I often see in the real world is Windows and Samba (sometimes referred to as CIFS) shares trying to sync the same files as NFS shares because Windows doesn't support NFS out of the box and so file locking doesn't work properly. Samba/CIFS has some advantages like user authentication tied to active directory out of the box as well as working out of the box on Windows (although older windows doesn't support versions of Samba that are secure), so if I need to give a user access to log into a share from within a LAN (or over VPN) from any device to manually pull files, I use that instead. But for my own machines I just set up NFS clients to sync.

One caveat is if you're using this for workstations or other devices that frequently reboot and/or need to be used offline from the LAN. Either don't mount the shares on boot, or take the time to set it up properly. By default I see a lot of people get frustrated that it takes a long time to boot because the mount is set as a prerequisite for completing the boot with the way some guides tell you to set it up. It's not an NFS issue; it's more of a grub and systemd (or most equivalents) being a pain to configure properly and boot systems making the default assumption that a mount that's configured on boot is necessary for the boot to complete.

The fact that you say using NFS makes you old makes me feel like fucking Yoda

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.

Samba or some sort of cloud like sync system like Sync thing or Nextcloud

Stick with NFS, and use e.g. rsync for backup. Or subversion, if you want to be super-safe.

I use a samba mount behind a VPN.

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.

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.

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.

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.