Ubuntu Server vs FreeNAS?? Not really an equal comparison. FreeNAS is specifically meant to be a NAS thats its main purpose. However through incorporating the use jails and VMs -- FreeNAS essentially can be anything you want it to be. FreeNAS also runs with ZFS natively (Ubuntu looks like it will in the future). Idk, I'm not trying to argue since there are many ways to skin a cat, but I'm not sure how you could say Ubuntu Server is definitively better than FreeNAS for network storage.
Also on the subject of hypervisors -- the one thing I mentioned about delta backups and such --- it wasn't to say that's the only backup solution there is. What I like about Xen is that it can be run with Xen Orchestra which makes it very easy to manage things. By default I think Xen Orchestra has about 5-6 different backup options available, but since its run on CentOS, if you wanted I'm sure you could probably run whatever you wanted. I unfortunately do IT for a living -- if I did I probably would be exposed to so much more. For Home use however, I really like xcp-ng (open source version of Xen hypervisor) where I can virtualize my pfSense router and also virtualize Ubuntu which runs Xen Orchestra. Although I love working from the command line, managing a lot of VMs can sometimes be tricky so its nice that a GUI is available for things were options can be deployed rather rapidly and its easy to get a feel for whats going on.
I ran proxmox prior to xcp-ng. I didn't think the product was bad, however the documentation isn't all that great, and their forums are very inactive. Many of the user questions go unanswered. For someone not as technical with all the KVM stuff, I really didn't like it all that much.
Bookmarks