Hello, I’m new. New to Nextcloud, to Raspberry Pi, and new to Linux…but I’m having fun. I recently bought a Raspberry Pi4B with 4GB ram (Raspbian Buster), and am running Pihole (w/DNS over HTTPS) and OpenVPN. I didn’t know something like Nextcloud existed, and I’m super curious about if it would work for me. Here are my specific questions:
I would be trying to use a thumb drive as my share medium, and I think I’m limited to formating the drive to ext4. Will I still be able to share files between my RasPi and my desktop (Mac) and iOS? Or will I need to find a format that is common between the 3?
Is there a file size limit due to using Raspbian/ext4?
I have seen there is a difference between Nextcloud, and NextcloudPi (NextcloudPlus?). From what I can tell, NextcloudPi should be used specifically if you are singularly using the RasPi for Nextcloud, as its a disk image and you would etch it directly to a new SD card. Can Nextcloud still work with my setup if I didn’t start with NextcloudPi?
Thank you for taking the time to read this, and double thank you if you happen to respond!
As long as you access the files through Nextcloud, you can use ext4. In case your Raspberry breaks or anything, you can’t directly read the data from the stick on your windows computer. But you can boot a linux system from a usb stick and this can then also read your ext4-stick.
Ext4 has a limit of 16 TiB per file (ext4 - Wikipedia). If you have a 32-bit system, the php-stuff is a bit tricky and it might be limited to 2GB (they said it was fixed once, but there have been problems reported after).
Nextcloud is just the software for running a Nextcloud server. You can use it on any linux system with a webserver and php installed (there are some requirements for the package). NextcloudPi is a ready-to-go installation based on Raspbian (a whole system image). So you can install Nextcloud on your raspian yourself.
Thanks tflidd! I didn’t even think of a plan incase the raspberry pi broke, that’s really good to know. I’ll dig around some more regarding the 2GB limit, this gives me a jumping off point though. Again, really appreciate your careful and speedy response!
I wanted to follow up here incase someone finds this string in the future. I ended up going with regular Nextcloud for my install (version 17.0.1) by following this ridiculously detailed guide after restoring from backups multiple times messing up using other sources:
This guide for me was the perfect walkthrough, serious kudos to the publisher!
I did run into a file size limit, which I think is due to the boot partition being fat32 format, 4GB. I am going to search around to see if this is due to my own config issues(I set the ‘upload_max_filesize = 20480M’ or 20GB on the php.ini file). My external storage medium is formatted ext4 though, so im not to optimistic on breaking the 4GB limit. Hopes this helps future tinker-ers!