How to access external NextCloud datafolder

upliftedduck@feddit.nl to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 14 points –

So, i have a NextCloud instance running, with the data directory binded to a folder on my storage. Now, when ik want to list or edit the contents of this folder directly from Nautilus or the terminal, I get a permission denied message. Obviously i do not have sufficent rights. How do i give myself permissions to at least view the contents of the folder? Maybe this is basis linux stuff, I have just not touched this before, and I don't want to modify this folder or break my NextCloud ;)

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Generally, in my experience, modifying the backing storage for a nextcloud instance is more of a PITA than its worth. I would just mount the webDAV in your file manager. This way the nextcloud db stays in sync with the backing storage.

If you are going to be making direct modifications to the backing storage, check this form post on modifying the nextcloud config to have it look for changes on the filesystem.

As for the permission side of things, run ls -lh in the folder that you want to make changes and see what the user:group is for ownership of the existing files and make sure your new files match. Chmod and chown will be your friends here and chmod has a --reference option that let's you mirror permissions from an existing file, a real time saver.

Hopefully this helps!

I hadn't thought of the database issue, thanks! I am afraid though that changing the ownership of the folder might break things though? Love the --reference option by the way

I would cd into the user folder that you want to add / remove files from and see what the ownership is to begin with and simply replicate ownership to match what's already there.

I went with the suggested mount as webdav, and this works out fine for me, thanks

Easiest way would be to use the Nextcloud desktop app which will mount your Nextcloud and present them inside nautilus for you to do as you wish.

That may well be a better idea, thanks. But one of the things i would like to do, besides view the contents of the folder, is rsync the directory to another storage, which brings up the permissions issue again

Nextcloud has the file system available via WebDAV. Mount the WebDAV to a local mount and go from there perhaps?

I'm guessing you're talking about the client, right? The data folder on the server shouldn't be touched or modified, except by Nextcloud.

Check who owns the folder. I'll assume the folder is at ~/Nextcloud, but if it's not, just substitute in the path to the Nextcloud folder.

You can check who owns the folder using ls:

ls -la ~/Nextcloud

This should give you something like:

drwx------ 10 user group    4096 2024-03-04 00:00 Nextcloud

Where the word "user" is in the above example should be the name of the owner of the directory. Where the word "group" is should be the group.

If either is root, check to make sure the Nextcloud client is not running as root (using sudo or otherwise).

Otherwise, give yourself ownership of the directory:

sudo chown username:username -R ~/Nextcloud

Replace username with your username.

Thanks for the explanation. Would that break nextcloud if i changed the owner of the folder?

The data is all stored server-side. The worst that could happen is the sync connection stops working and you need to redownload the files. Nothing gets deleted by these commands. They will still be on your disk and accessible by you.

If this breaks Nextcloud, it indicates something's wrong with your installation.

Thanks, I went with the suggested webdav route, this is fine for now.