Nextcloud Setup

Install Nextcloud

snap allows for an overall easy install process. Additionally, you can run hostname -I to get IP to access nextcloud webpage using http://YOUR_IP_ADDR.

sudo snap install nextcloud

Mounting your disks

Mounting/ Unmounting allows for users to manage file systems across multiple drives. Mounting attached a drives to a directory which allows you to put files on that drives. Unmounting disconnects the drive from the computer system. When mounting, make sure your user has root privileges. lsblk shows all avaliable devices

lsblk

Then, you make the mount point folder & mount the drive

sudo mkdir /mnt/mydrivedir
sudo mount /dev/drive /mnt/mydrivedir

Lastly, I wanted the drives to get mounted everytime my system booted. I configured the /etc/fstab file

sudo nano /etc/fstab

# line added to fstab, add per drive
UUID=your-uuid-here  /mnt/mydrivedir  device_format  defaults,nofail  0  2

After mounting, make sure you login to nextcloud webpage and properly configure the external storage and mounting through the app. Issues I ran into were making sure I was configuring external storage - ADMIN not external storage - personal. Make sure to download the app for external storage as well.

Creating a backup script

For my purposes, I wanted to have a script run weekly to backup my files from my main drive to a backup drive. I setup mnt/backup that holds folders of my nextcloud data & file contents run every sunday at 2am.

# First I created the script
sudo nano /usr/local/bin/nextcloud-backup.sh

Here are my nextclod-backup.sh file contents

#!/bin/bash
DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
BACKUP_DIR="/mnt/backup/nextcloud-$DATE"
mkdir -p "$BACKUP_DIR"

echo "Starting Nextcloud backup: $DATE"

# Enable maintenance mode
sudo nextcloud.occ maintenance:mode --on

# Backup data
rsync -avz /mnt/storage/ "$BACKUP_DIR/data/"

# Backup config
rsync -avz /var/snap/nextcloud/common/nextcloud/config/ "$BACKUP_DIR/config/"

# Backup database
sudo nextcloud.export -abc "$BACKUP_DIR/database"

# Disable maintenance mode
sudo nextcloud.occ maintenance:mode --off

echo "Backup complete: $BACKUP_DIR"

Finally, I ran a cron exec to allow this script to run on a schedule

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/nextcloud-backup.sh
# every sunday at 2am
(sudo crontab -l 2>/dev/null; echo "0 2 * * 0 /usr/local/bin/nextcloud-backup.sh >> /var/log/nextcloud-backup.log 2>&1") | sudo crontab -

Configuring Reboot Script

For extra precaution, I want my files to still be accessible when I reboot. I edited my etc/rc.local script to securely rescan my files when my server reboots

sudo nano /etc/rc.local

My rc.local file contents

#!/bin/bash
# Wait for drives to mount
sleep 10
# mount all drives listed
mount -a
# find and fix all permissions on mounted drives
for d in /mnt/*/; do
        if mountpoint -q "$d"; then
                echo "Setting permissions on $d"
                chown -R root:root "$d"
                chmod -R 775 "$d"
        else
                echo "WARNING: $d is not a mntpt, skipping"
        fi
done

#nextcloud: ensures snap has removeable media access
snap connect nextcloud:removable-media :removable-media

#restore nextcloud ports and restarts
snap set nextcloud ports.http=80 ports.https=443
snap restart nextcloud

#waits for nextcloud to come back
sleep 20

I understand there are more efficent ways to run and reboot, but this method works for me. For future implementation, I will look more into improving this.

Accessing my files outside of my network

To be able to access your files wherever you are, you need to configure your nextcloud webpage with DNS. I did this by using cloudflare and cloudflare tunneling. Check the cloudflare setup page for the setup.

Sources

Mounting & Unmounting