First off, thanks for the phenomenal effort in producing and maintaining NextCloud. I’ve spent the last few days getting my first cloud set up and it works perfectly. I do have a question I’m hoping someone can answer for me: I have a couple of SMB/CIFS shares set up as external storage in my NextCloud instance and they work fine. I logged onto my Linux host that’s running NextCloud and I didn’t see the shares mounted, so I assume NextCloud is using API calls instead of directly mounting the shares. My question is can I mount those same shares directly on my NextCloud host OS without messing up NextCloud? As I said I’ve spent several days getting this set up and working the way I want it, so I’m hesitant to experiment without asking first.
You normally don’t mount the drives but install the Nextcloud desktop client to sync files/folders to your clients. Here you will find information about the available client apps:
Thanks for the info. I already have the NextCloud client installed and working, and I can access the files on my shares via NextCloud with no problem. What I want to know is if it’s safe to also mount the shares directly on the system that’s hosting NextCloud, or if that could cause problems.
As long as you mount the shares using the WebDAV protocol you should be on the save side because the Nextcloud database will be updated on file changes. If you use SMB/CIFS this update doesn’t happen so that files might not correctly been shown in Nextcloud.