Activity on Folders

Hi there,

I have a folder that is shared via a public link with modify rights. I am using an external cloudsend.sh to upload backups to that folder.

Now periodically files are missing from the folder, probably due to failed uploads. I was expecting to see the activity in that folder to find out who/when that was. However I see nothing.

Is this due to activity_use_cached_mountpoints (although this doesnt seem to be a group folder?!).

Also if this fails how can I simply search activities (i.e. for a filename?)? I dont seem to be able to get this to work either.

Many thanks for pointers.

For those like me who hadn’t seen cloudsend.sh before, it looks like a handy cli tool for uploading things to Nextcloud!
Anything it uploads successfully should show up in Activity, but you won’t get entries for failed uploads. The client output or web server logs might be better places to find that, depending on verbosity settings.
If you don’t have access to those logs, you could Favorite the folder the backups are supposed to go to. Then you can filter the Activity feed by Favorites, and work out what you’re missing by process of elimination.

I’ve created a dedicated topic for cloudsend.sh

Really neat tool! Let’s be sure they always get a dedicated topic rather than leaving them buried in other topics. That way everyone benefits. Cheers, and good look with sorting out activity on your folders.

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I think Nextcloud is not the correct platform for manage backups. Overall access path and also logging activities is way too unreliable for important backups.

thanks mactrent for the suggestion with favoriting the folder to at least have a somewhat clunky means of filtering the activities.

In the folder itself i see no activity at all, just that i created and shared the folder aeons ago.

hi devnull, I don’t want to make this a topic about what is being stored. I value all my data and if I share that externally I want to be able to track what happens to the files. Vanished files without me being able to find out who or when it was deleted seems like a trust destroying thing.

Have you checked /var/www nextcloud.log for errors, also available as admin from top right hand menu. That would be a place to look for issues.

If the uploads are that important your best bet is to create a guest user account and have people use the legit desktop client. As you’ve noted, there is nothing you can do about a failed upload on the client’s end.

@just thanks for the tip, that gave the right direction.

Turns out a virus scanner on another computer flagged a binary within the backup as suspicious and proceeded to delete it. This in turn was synchronized across all devices…

Still, I think it would be great to have something like “show all activities in this folder (and subfolders)” as a filter within activities, no?

What about using the existing Activity app? You can monitor it via RSS (bottom left menu of that app in webui) and then filter the activity displayed from your RSS client.

thanks for your suggestion. I will check if it is possible.

However for me personally the great benefit of using a “cloud” is that it is accessible from all devices. Having to parse an rss feed on a device with another program sounds pretty much like a roadblock in that regard.

You could always use Nextcloud News or any other rss server.

Ah, but does Nextcloud News have a filter? Not that I’ve seen, though I might like that functionality sometime.

It does not, but at least it makes the feeds accessible on the server.

Best bet for a filtered RSS server would be to spin up FreshRSS, tt-rss or Miniflux, then enjoy all the filters your heart desires.

and/or, you could offload your activity RSS feed to Wallabag or Archivebox. All are totally amazing.

Filtering only takes a few seconds to setup on an RSS feed, so it isn’t anything that cannot be setup in a couple minutes. It is the only way to go imo since it will still be there if your Nextcloud is offline or unavailable.

Here is a feature request for exposing an arbitrary folder as an Activity app rss feed.