NFS
Ranked 3 of 6 self-hosted file managers by recommenders
People recommend NFS as a fast, tunable and familiar way to share files over a network, often preferred over SMB. Critics say its authentication is complicated and its design suits network latency poorly.
People recommend NFS as a fast, tunable and familiar way to share files over a network, often preferred over SMB. Critics say its authentication is complicated and its design suits network latency poorly.
38 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 20
- criticize it
- 18
- approval share
- 53%
Recommended in 9 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 20 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.1 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 9 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Fast and snappy over networks
“NFS is so much better than SMB (for me) it's unbelievable how much I missed out over the years using SMB”
Comment from 2 Dec 2025 in “SMB vs. NFS: Why I switched for Home Lab file sharing” “Mount something over NFS and you'll be relieved about how snappy things remain.”
Comment from 1 Feb 2026 in “TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe” “NFS is really a great protocol with a lot of tricks to reduce round trips”
Comment from 8 Jul 2026 in “Chorus: A fast WAL for object storage” Tunable for many edge cases
“can be tweaked to solve a variety of edge-cases that no closed system can match”
Comment from 2 Feb 2026 in “TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe” “NFS can be used in a proper and productive manner, but it requires adjustments.”
Comment from 30 Apr 2026 in “Bugs Rust Won't Catch” Works well on modest hardware
“I've found great convenience in a tight NFSv3 config running from a single high capacity HDD”
Comment from 8 Jul 2026 in “How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS” “none of it worked as well as NFS did on ancient Sun pizzabox and lunchbox hardware”
Comment from 5 May 2026 in “Don't let your Mac's storage fill up” Works well for many uses
“Use good old NFS instead of the latest longceph horngluster version”
Comment from 24 Apr 2026 in “I Am Building a Cloud” “I find it extremely useful and it works well for many use cases.”
Comment from 1 May 2026 in “Bugs Rust Won't Catch”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Complicated authentication and setup
“NFS would be great if you didn't had to chose between KDC infrastructure or "trust me bro I'm uid 501".”
Comment from 10 Nov 2025 in “Installing and using HP-UX 9” “NFSv4 has no concept of true "Authentication" and just blindly accepts whatever the client sends”
Comment from 21 May 2026 in “Mounting Git commits as folders with NFS” “I tried to set up network file sharing with NFS the other day and it was like pulling teeth”
Comment from 28 Nov 2025 in “Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?” - Comment from 1 May 2026 in “I Got Sick of Remembering Port Numbers”
- Comment from 2 Feb 2026 in “TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again on Tahoe”
Mac client quirks and move bugs
“had some really nasty move/duplication issues with NFS the last time I tried it in Finder.app”
Comment from 27 Apr 2026 in “Apple is dropping AFP/TimeCapsule support in macOS 27” “My beefs with NFS is MacOS being extremely quirk with settings.”
Comment from 22 May 2026 in “Mounting Git commits as folders with NFS” Poorly suited to network latency
“Latency is at least two orders of magnitude higher.”
Comment from 1 May 2026 in “Bugs Rust Won't Catch” “its data model being ill-suited to network latency”
Comment from 4 May 2026 in “Bugs Rust Won't Catch” “would hang processes if connection was lost.”
Comment from 29 Apr 2026 in “Bugs Rust Won't Catch”
Other self-hosted file managers people recommend
The four most recommended other self-hosted file managers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| copyparty | 39 | 9 | 81% | 10 | — | Approved |
| Samba | 36 | 21 | 63% | 12 | — | — |
| NFSThis page | 20 | 18 | 53% | 9 | — | — |
| Filestash | 15 | 2 | 88% | 10 | 9 yrs3 owners | Approved |
| FileBrowser | 8 | 0 | 100% | 4 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 50 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“9P is perhaps not as robust or as fault tolerant as NFS”
“NFSv4 is a different beast and more powerful”
“NFS which has its complexity issues”
“I've found great convenience in a tight NFSv3 config running from a single high capacity HDD”
“NFS is really a great protocol with a lot of tricks to reduce round trips”
“My beefs with NFS is MacOS being extremely quirk with settings.”
“you agree NFS is not fit for purpose (network file sharing)”
“I am criticizing NFS as a whole, and specifically its Linux implementation.”
“NFSv4 has no concept of true "Authentication" and just blindly accepts whatever the client sends”
“none of it worked as well as NFS did on ancient Sun pizzabox and lunchbox hardware”
“its data model being ill-suited to network latency”
“I find it extremely useful and it works well for many use cases.”
“NFS and similar services have often suffered from the "too complicated to debug" problem”
“Latency is at least two orders of magnitude higher.”
“NFS can be used in a proper and productive manner, but it requires adjustments.”
“That is provides the same interface is what makes NFS extremely useful.”
“would hang processes if connection was lost.”
“had some really nasty move/duplication issues with NFS the last time I tried it in Finder.app”
“Use good old NFS instead of the latest longceph horngluster version”
“would be simply using NFS. You can get replication with RAID.”
“It's not like nfs is a real shining example of simplicity either.”
“very slow reads, much slow than cp”
“the level of complexity of NFS auth is just comical”
“can be tweaked to solve a variety of edge-cases that no closed system can match”
“Mount something over NFS and you'll be relieved about how snappy things remain.”
“If only we had NFS to begin with”
“the main issue we had was clients claiming that files didn't exist when they did”
“Unfortunately, NFSv4 also has the silly rename semantics...”
“nfs traversing firewalls sucks”
“I tried NFS but the performance was bad.”
“they all let you read any range of file, and start giving the data immediately”
“Simplest system I could come up with.”
“It was fairly seamless and .... interesting.”
“NFS was to be avoided as wifi was shit then”
“NFSv4 + OpenLDAP + Kerberos would be the correct answer in this particular case based on OP's concerns”
“NFS is so much better than SMB (for me) it's unbelievable how much I missed out over the years using SMB”
“I tried to set up network file sharing with NFS the other day and it was like pulling teeth”
“all the NFS and NIS silliness I've put up with at the 8 companies”
“they used NFS to mount home dirs local to the computer clusters, which wasn't as cool”
“NFS would be great if you didn't had to chose between KDC infrastructure or "trust me bro I'm uid 501".”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.