3 reasons to upgrade your ownCloud instance to Nextcloud and how easy it is

Originally published at: 3 reasons to upgrade your ownCloud instance to Nextcloud and how easy it is - Nextcloud

Since ownCloud 10.0.0 was released, many users have been asking us how to migrate to the latest version of Nextcloud. We have turned our update mechanism into a easy to use migration tool to make it as easy as possible to move over and get the benefits of Nextcloud!

In this blog, we will give you three good reasons to migrate and a short walk-through of using our migration tool. Jump immediately to the instructions if you’re already convinced it is time to move over!

ownCloud vs Nextcloud - why would I migrate?

Last week, Nextcloud 12 was released and thousands of users upgraded their Nextcloud instances, many of whom shared how great the upgrade experience had been and how they appreciated Nextcloud 12 on Twitter and other social media. Nextcloud 12 is a big upgrade, delivering significant new capabilities around communication and collaboration. It builds those improvements on the very solid base of Nextcloud 11 which set a new standard of stability, performance, and security in open source file sync and share technology.

There are three simple, clear reasons to migrate your ownCloud system to Nextcloud.

First, stability. Nextcloud 12 is a far more reliable update than the latest ownCloud according to comments from users on social media while Global Scale shows we have the know-how to truly move open source file sync and share technology forward.

Second, security - if this is an important concern to you, Nextcloud is the only option that puts its money where its mouth is with a third-party verified focus on secure development backed by a 5K Security Bug Bounty program.

And last, Nextcloud 12 extends the lead we have in features over other solutions.

Upgrades of #Nextcloud are just jaw-dropping, upgrade to 12 took literally 5 min of my time. Kudos to @Nextclouders!

— Jiří Eischmann (@Sesivany) May 24, 2017

Stability

Nextcloud 11 was widely praised for its stability and reliable upgrades. Our experienced team, with most people having 3 to over 7 years experience working on ownCloud and now Nextcloud, built a new updater and did extensive testing together with our community.

We already updated our internal Nextcloud server to the Nextcloud 12 beta even before it was released. Using your own product is a great way to make sure it is reliable and it avoids obvious issues like a broken LDAP or losing calendar and contacts data - we would fix those right away that as we use the Calendar, Contacts and Mail apps daily ourselves!

But don’t take our word for it. You can simply search social medial like Twitter and compare.

Successfully migrated from ownCloud into a clean #nextcloud (Banana Pi M1, #Armbian). KDE's Kontact is great to ex/import .vcf & .ics. pic.twitter.com/sgF2bK9vZf

— Heinz Kramski-Grote (@hkramski) May 13, 2017

Testing also involves community contributions and apps. Nextcloud already had dozens of apps available for Nextcloud 12 before the beta was even out. You’ll also notice apps are typically very up to date on the Nextcloud app store, as they are primarily developed in the Nextcloud community.

So far so good with the new #nextcloud update to version 12. Easy upgrades per usual with @Nextclouders

— Zachary Rohrbach (@zacharyrohrbach) May 22, 2017

Security

All of the security hardenings introduced in Nextcloud 11, as well as the further work in Nextcloud 12 like our authentication improvements or our bruteforce and rate limiting enhancements, are all good reasons to upgrade, as they are unique to Nextcloud. Other security capabilities and optional apps like the 2-factor authentication app, developed and maintained by two Nextcloud developers, are also improving with every release.

Nextcloud had a well-known security firm review its security processes (download the full report by NCC Group) and has a response time to security issues measured in the hours. We recently wrote a report on our Security Bug Bounty program, where we already paid white hat hackers over 5K for responsible disclosure so you don’t end up paying with your data!

The results of this work become publicly visible on HackerOne. You can read the entire process of finding, analyzing and fixing a security issue reported by a security researcher in, for example, this recent XSS vulnerability.

Features

Nextcloud is the most actively developed open source file sync and share project and it shows.

Nextcloud 11 was mostly focused on massive scalability and security improvements. It performed easily 60% faster in large installations than previous versions and introducing a wide range of security improvements like brute force protection, CSP 3.0, password verification and more. While Nextcloud 12 will feature further enhancements in both areas, even our December release is still significantly ahead and will lower your server load and improve responsiveness for users compared to any ownCloud release out there.

Besides this, Nextcloud 11 introduced a number of features like Apache Solr powered Full-Text Search, video calls, and many smaller enhancements, pretty much all still unique to Nextcloud.

Nextcloud 12 expanded its lead with many new collaboration and communication features. For large installations but also benefiting smaller, Nextcloud has started development of a major new architecture, Global Scale, which brings orders of magnitude better scaling, lowers cost, and give more control over data locality to enterprise users.

Find a more detailed feature comparision on our website.

How to upgrade to Nextcloud

If you are currently on ownCloud 10.0.0 or an even earlier release, upgrading is extremely easy thanks to our brand new ownCloud-Nextcloud migration tool! Here's how to use it.

Use a comand line terminal to log in to your ownCloud server and navigate to the folder where ownCloud is installed and execute these commands:

  • grab the update script:
    wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/installer/migrator/index.php
    put it in the updater folder:
    mv index.php.1 updater/index.php
    (there is already an index.php in the ownCloud folder so the newly downloaded one will be called index.php.1)
  • Now go in your browser to the URL of your ownCloud server, say your.owncloudserver.cop and append updater/index.php: your.owncloudserver.com/updater/index.php
  • You should now see our migrator. Just follow the steps! Watch our video below to see how easy it is.

You can do the final step manually from the command line, which is advised on large installations where the time-out on PHP via the web interface can be a problem. Note that ownCloud 10.0.1 can not yet be migrated to Nextcloud 12, we are still testing this upgrade path to make sure it is 100% reliable!

You can also, of course, do all this the manual way. For example, to upgrade from ownCloud 10.0.0 to Nextcloud 12, you log into the ownCloud server, navigate to the folder where ownCloud is installed and:

  • Turn on Maintenance Mode by editing config/config.php and setting 'maintenance' => true,
    Add the item if it isn't yet there. You can also use the command line tool (replacing www-data with what is relevant on your platform): sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:mode --on
  • Move old folder out of the way: cd .. && mv owncloud OLDcloud
  • Grab the latest Nextcloud 12 and extract it: wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/latest-12.zip unzip latest-12.zip mv nextcloud owncloud
    (you can keep it a nextcloud folder but you'll have to adjust your server configuration that way)
  • Move in the config and data and start the update: mv OLDcloud/data owncloud mv OLDcloud/config/config.php owncloud/config sudo -u www-data php occ upgrade
  • Disable Maintenance Mode by editing config/config.php and set 'maintenance' => false,
    You can also use the command line tool (replacing www-data with what is relevant on your platform): sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:mode --off

Now you have all the benefits of a faster, more secure and more powerful private cloud solution with more capabilities and you can look forward to further enhancements thanks to our fast development pace!

1 Like

This is all great, but when is the Nextcloud Mac client going have the SSL issue fixed? We still have to use the ownCloud client to connect to our instance of Nextcloud.

And after the migration you guys stop the stupid abusive daily scanning of hundreds of thousands of servers?

Try the beta of 2.3.2 - grab it here directly: https://download.nextcloud.com/desktop/prereleases/Mac/Nextcloud-2.3.2beta.pkg

This might have this fixed.

If you like to no longer be checked by other servers on the internet like the one we used (shodan.io) and the many others, the best solution is to disconnect from the internet and use your server only on a local network.

If your only concern is with our service, which merely checks what version is installed you can always use the mail address on the bottom of the scanner to get your server removed.

We’ll keep offering this service to our users as it has helped immensely in securing tens of thousands of private cloud servers.

If you want to re-open the discussion about this, feel free to sent me a private message or an email.

Thanks, Jos. Unfortunately the beta client is still having the issue.

Tried manual upgrade from owncloud 9. When I run sudo -u www-data php occ upgrade I get:

Exception: Updates between multiple major versions and downgrades are unsupported.
Update failed

How to best solve this?

Updated: I followed the advice below. Had to go owncloud 9.1 -> nextcloud 10.0.5 -> nextcloud 11.0.3 -> nextcloud12-latest. Everything seems to work fine.

1 Like

You have to upgrade in stages. You can’t jump too far. That is how i made it work.

on https://nextcloud.com/migration/ you will find:

ownCloud 9.0.x is compatible with Nextcloud 9.0.x
ownCloud 9.1.x is compatible with Nextcloud 10.0.x
ownCloud 10.0.x is compatible with Nextcloud 12.0.x

In my case i had owncloud 9.1 so i upgraded to nextcloud 10.0. Then after that i upgraded to nextcloud 12

1 Like

The instructions here explicitly say you can upgrade from earlier than 10… Perhaps this page should be edited to make it correct.

1 Like

I believe OwnCloud recently dropped a point release on 9, thus breaking the upgrade path.
It should work, though you’ll need to edit your config.php file and drop the owncloud version down a point release (9.3.7 to 9.3.6, for example), or wait for a patch via NC.

1 Like

Sorry :frowning:
Yeah, this is a Qt issue and building it with the right SSL requires a lot of magic. Once the client migrates to a newer version of Qt this should become a lot easier. I had hoped 2.3.2 did that but I guess not :frowning: sorry, not much to do. Keep using the oC until a new Qt is supported.

My successful less effort upgrade path:
OC 8.2 -> OC 9.0.0 -> OC 9.1.5 -> OC 10.0.0 -> NC 12.0.0
Important!!!: Do not upgrade to OC 10.0.1, it will prevent the nextcloud upgrade step.

Third party Apps will not survive the entire process. Ask users to export contacts and calendars if you use the oc’s plus versions, to be imported later into nc apps.

Make backups or try before on a test server.

Hope this helps any one.

2 Likes

I’m on 10.0.2.0: Is there a stable way to NextCloud?
Is a “debian-way” planned? (I suggest a repo and a deb-package which do the migration work)

There is not yet an official fix. However you could try to manually adjust the version string in your config.php, as Jason started above, or discussed here, after full backup, especially database dump:

There is no official repository from Nextcloud developers planned, but here you find a list of repos from other users or the official distro maintainers:

hi there,

the so easy migration is not so easy as it could be. The migration page claims:

This is the compatiblity overview:

ownCloud 9.0.x is compatible with Nextcloud 9.0.x
ownCloud 9.1.x is compatible with Nextcloud 10.0.x
ownCloud 10.0.x is compatible with Nextcloud 12.0.x

Nextcloud - Migration guide

I’m stuck on a ownCloud 10.0.2, the latest stable release from oc.
When I put in Nextcloud 12.0.0, and try to run the upgrade with “php occ upgrade”, I get this:

Exception: Updates between multiple major versions and downgrades are unsupported.
Update failed

Changing values in the config.php does not appear to be solution, still I get the same error.
Of course, at some other place it’s written:

Note that ownCloud 10.0.1 can not yet be migrated to Nextcloud 12
Nextcloud - Migration guide

But why there is a list claiming the opposite? :confused:

Soon 12.0.1 will be out which will 99% sure support moving from 10.0.2 to 12. One or two more weeks at most :wink:

EDIT: Nextcloud 12.0.1RC4 - HELP TEST! -> 12.0.1RC4 is now in testing, you can help out. Yes, it took long - we made a LOT of improvements.

3 Likes

Soon 12.0.1 will be out which will 99% sure support moving from 10.0.2 to 12. One or two more weeks at most :wink:
jospoortvliet - Marketing & PR

that sounds good, thank you! :slight_smile:

Until that, just have a look on the answers above yours ;).

A post was split to a new topic: Permission issues during update of NC 9

Is there now a save way without a lot of handcraft work from the 10.0.2.0 to NC?
Will it work, when I follow https://nextcloud.com/migration/ and then change the repo http://repo.morph027.de/#nextcloud-server on my Jessie-Box?