Port forwarding will work, but it has major downsides

1. Will draw attention of bots
2. Secure as long as there are no security holes in openssh (which is rare but has happened)
3. You _must_ harden the ssh server by disabling password auth, putting behind fail2ban

There are far better and safer alternatives that I would recommend over exposing a raw port to the world.

1. Tailscale
2. Wireguard/OpenVPN

Use Samba.

If you want a GUI for samba on ubuntu checkout

- casaos

- open media vault

CasaOS is about as easy as it gets.

curl -fsSL https://get.casaos.io | sudo bash  

It provides a gui front end for docker. You can install it on any debian based system (which mint is). Combine that with the portainer app and there isn’t much you can’t do.

All the major NAS brands have a google cloud sync (synology/QNAP/asusstor/casaos)

Owncloud/Nextcloud have a google drive sync plugin

You could use something like rsync to copy to another cloud or drive.

1. You could add more with a usb/thunderbolt/sas jbod expansion.

2. Buy a bigger unit, transfer the drives and sell the old one

3. Clustering/hyperconverged with truenas or ceph

Unraid- if your drives are different sizes. Truenas - if you have lots of ram and like ZFS. CasaOs - If you like pretty things. Proxmox + Open Media Vault - If you want to run vms.

If you want a beautiful front end for docker containers

CasaOS/ZimaOS Cosmos-server Unbrel

Otherwise

• proxmox
• truenas
• unraid

Casaos is new. It is pretty similar to portainer. It is still a pretty frontend for debian targeted twards tinkerers.

The end goal is for ZimaOS to replace/supliment CasaOS which is intended to be a more direct competitor to Synology/QNAP software. ZimaOS will be the OS released on their ZimaCube Kickstarter

As others have mentioned there are competitors like Cosmos-server and Umbrel. CasaOS/ZimaOS has a pretty strong company behind it, so the chances it gets abandoned are low. Cosmos and Umbrel are more of a hobby of a few people that may or may not be around 5 years from now.