Homelab

Hello everyone,

I have a specific problem that I'm trying to solve as in the title, but it goes a bit deeper. So I need your help; if anyone had a similar experience before. I have a server with all the usual goodies such as TrueNAS, PiHole, CasaOS, NextCloud, etc running on Proxmox and since it is running all the time I'm trying to make the most out of the bills I pay.

Sometimes I need to be mobile and run around with a laptop pc and an external HDD and I can't express how much I don't like to use an external hdd. So I thought, what if I carry the HDD only when it's absolutely necessary, and other than that it stays connected to my server and accessible on the network, and as a self hosted cloud storage. My idea is to always have the same partition an content whether it's shared or mobile. So disassembling it and connecting the drive locally is not an option, also as far as I can understand I can't use it with TrueNas either (or after on Windows).

TL;DR: I want to use an external drive as a cloud storage on my server but I want to be able to carry it around when I need to.

Is this even possible? If so, what is the best way to setup something like this?

10 years ago I had an Asus router with a usb port, and whenever I connect a usb drive, it was exposing the content to the network. I want the same experience basically.

All help is appreciated. Thank you.