Sorry if I’m on the bad category, don’t hesitate to move this topic to the good one.
I’m talking with my manager about Nextcloud for some of our customers as an alternative to closed source products. He’s really enjoying the idea, with a very vanilla NC (files + contacts + calendar, no extra app or just very few) but gave me some actual issues with our customers that are on 0365 and what kind of troubles we would expect to deal with if we had to support their Nextcloud installations.
I could answer some of his questions, but he had me on an important one : Backup, and more specifically, restore.
Actually, everything seems to be quiet simple to install NC anywhere. It works nicely (I’m in charge of my own instance) and I take backups with (what I think is) the classical move : dump the db then save it along with the files.
I know how I could get files from the bin, but he got me when he asked how we could restore one deleted calendar from backups, without having to fully restore the customer Nextcloud on another place and extract the needed informations to then put them back into the customer NC.
He explained that actually, with what we provide to our customers, we can backup everything and then restore from Veeam elements like individual calendars. Is there any mean to have that kind of granular restore for Nextcloud?
I think you will always find features in a software like Microsoft 365 that are not available in other solutions. So you will always find reasons to use alternative solutions if you consider the status quo as standard. Also he will ask who to call in case of error. Now you can call for all windows problems at Microsoft. You can, can’t you?
I do not have a solution for your particular problem. But there are certainly 1000 other theretic problems. I think Nextcloud is not the correct solution for you. Or buy a Managed Nextcloud with support.
I really don’t know if we could consider granular restore as a feature, but that’s another subject.
The idea behind our approach of Nextcloud is to allow customers that won’t go to O365 for various reasons (data control, price, etc.) to have an alternative. We are here for them, to help them, but we need to know what kind of potential issues we will be facing. It’s not about “who you’re gonna call?” (GHOST-BUSTEEEERS) in case of issue, it’s more about “how could we manage daily issues?”. And granular restore for some elements is one of the daily things we could face.
Of course, Nextcloud support is an option we are clearly looking at, but we need to be our customer first caller when things get bad and take immediate action for things like that, and it’s kinda crazy to run a product we would support with any knowledge on the way to support it… Also, we are working with multiple non-profit organizations, that are very short on their IT budget, and having an extra support would be difficult for them.
I don’t think from my point of view that Nextcloud is not the correct solution for that need, actually it matches on the issues we face (the technical and ethical ones) with ms products, I just need to know what we can do and how we can prepare ourselves for the customers needs.
Sounds your are planning kind of a business model. Maybe direct talk with Nextcloud GmbH helps you to find good solution with support contract and help to close functional gaps preventing you from using this software?
granular restore is definitely welcome. at least for you initial request solution workaround exists already in NC24:
