Avoid complete nextcloud resync to client if data are already on the client (via rsync)

📱 Desktop & mobile clients 💻 Desktop
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Hello,
over a long run of time I gathered may photos (140GB). The master copy of these data resides on my home nextcloud server and is synced via nextcloud client on a local linux system via a 1Gb link to the nextcloud server. To avoid data loss I also mirrored these data to another remote linux host using unison and/or rsync.

The problem is that the network link between those two linux hosts is slow (2Mbit/sec) which is not a problem as long only new data have to be synced.

Now I would like to try to also use the nextcloud client for this sync process. All the data are already on the destination client in the correct subdir of nextcloud tree. Up to now I told the nextcloud client not to sync this sub directory.

I could of course start a full sync via nextcloud client but this would take close to an eternity because of the slow network link.

Therefore I ask myself if there is any way to to tell the nextcloud client that all the data is already there and up to date.

Any ideas?
Thanks
Rainer

2

This was a major issue for quite some time with only some workaround (not sure if they work very well): https://github.com/owncloud/client/issues/3422 (and linked issues).

ownCloud now uses hashes and solved this issue probably: https://github.com/owncloud/client/pull/5838
I’m not sure if the patch has been backported and if the hash-sum stuff works like this in Nextcloud. Check the Nextcloud bug tracker (https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop) if your issue has been tracked, if not add a new report, perhaps add the one how ownCloud fixed it.

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Can anyone tell me if this issue has been fixed or what the best workaround is? I want to move my server with 2 TB of data to another location and sync via the web. Completely re-syncing would unfortunately take at least 2 weeks…

Thanks!

4

There is now a feature request at Nextcloud as well (still open, so it’s not solved):

1 Like
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https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/issues/1383:
" I think if you have installed your new os and then create a new nextcloud account and tell nextcloud that its data directory is exactly the directory with your copy from your nextcloud root folder backup and also tell nextcloud to keep existing data this should work without any problems"

Have somebody test it? If somebody migrate to the same url (https://cloud.myserver.tld) than it should work or not?
@rainer042 Do you use in the final constallation the same username and nextcloud-servername?

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Yes I use the very same username and also the same servername. I deleted my nextcloud config, recreated it with identical values, told nextcloud where my data root is, an then when asked said to keep the local data. This worked for me without problems.