So I know what i want to do but don’t know how best to do it. I have a Truenas server that I’d like to use for regularly backing up a ubuntu(20.04) laptop and a few shares that live on an unraid server.
The truenas build is very new all it has is a vm running pihole on it. I haven’t turned on any sharing services. Should i use NFS or SMB? I have a matching user on each of the 3 systems with identical passwords. What are the best practices for setting up shares on Truenas? Is it OK to have 1 dataset for all my devices?
Sharing between BSD (TrueNAS/Unraid) and Linux (Ubuntu) is best done via NFS. Explore the UI of both servers to see what options are available to you and find a matching pair. Backing up the laptop is probably best done via rsync, as it only transfers the modified files (except of course on the initial sync, when it copies everything 
)
Having a single dataset has the danger of loosing everything. I lost a lot of data (mainly photo’s) when my rsync command went heywire several years ago, it essentially wiped the data from my fileserver/backup. Fortunately, I could recover a lot, but still much data was lost definitively.
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When you have established a connection between the client and the NAS and have a working network share you are free to use whatever backup software you want. A very popular candidate that is often recommended on this forum is restic.
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