Well, greetings people of the internet—Unky Joe here. In part one of my Proxmox Lab series for 2026, I’m showing you how I turned “Big Bertha” (a Supermicro 4U 36-bay SAS box) into an archival NAS using TrueNAS running as a VM on Proxmox. The whole point is simple: Proxmox lets me pass through the HBA so a single TrueNAS VM can see a pile of drives (up to 36 bays worth), and TrueNAS does what I need—manage ZFS pools and shares—without dragging me into a bunch of stuff I’m not trying to run on a backup box. I walk through the basics: creating a user (I match my Active Directory username/password to keep things seamless), building ZFS pools grouped by drive sizes, creating datasets, and setting ACLs so SMB shares work the way I expect. Then I show my monthly routine using FreeFileSync: I compare, then mirror my Synology shares over to TrueNAS so I’ve got an offline “oh no” copy that’s never more than about 30 days old. Big Bertha pulls around 373 watts, so I’m not leaving it on 24/7—even with solar and battery—this is meant to come online, sync, and go back to sleep.