Cannot recover after HDD crash

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1

I was running nextcloud on Raspberry Pi and data was on NAS.
Recently my NAS was crashed and I couldn’t rescue the data.

The problem is once I replaced NAS to new one, Nextcloud failed to do anything.
From browser access, it said “internal server error”.
Then OCC said “you data directory is invalid”.
So I copied /var/www/html/nextcloud/data to the new NAS and found that it lacks “.ocdata”, which I cannot find it the original nextcloud data folder.
Is there anyway to recreate ocdata or entire data directory?

2

Hello Druoh, there are many post about the " .ocdata " file. This is a empty file that resides in the root of your userdata folder.

If /var/www/html/nextcloud/data is your " DATADIRECTORY " in your config.php you can create the file there with

sudo -u www-data touch .ocdata

where www-data is the apache user.

best of luck

3

Vincent, thank you about your help.
Now I can run occ, and occ check does not return anything.

However, Internal Sever Error persists while accessing from browser.
It looks some connection there through desktop app, and a few folders were created. Server returns 403 forbidden when a new file was added.

4

I think you should share more.

You NAS crashed ok

What data was on it?
A:) Nextcloud server
B:) Nextcloud USER data a.k.a datadirectory
C:) ALL the above

Where was the NAS mounted?
A:) /mnt/data
B:) /media/data
C:) different …

what is the contents of config.php.

5

Server is /var/www/html/nextcloud/
and data was on NAS.
As NAS is mounted as /media/pi/nas/

in the /media/pi/nas, I can find:
.htaccess
.ocdata
index/html
nextcloud.log
and some user related folders created once nextcloud somehow started yesterday.

config.php is:
GNU nano 3.2 config.php

<?php $CONFIG = array ( 'instanceid' => 'ocf6796ow8ds', 'passwordsalt' => 'uiNDE2D2tspSucSbulcWTp9GNWcnMV', 'secret' => 'SqSTbqC53W7dLGi4PK0uHTLFbUYVUqfXN7Cj8Vroyb85Y0sS', 'trusted_domains' => array ( 0 => '172.25.191.151', ), 'datadirectory' => '/media/pi/nas', 'dbtype' => 'mysql', 'version' => '17.0.0.9', 'overwrite.cli.url' => '[http://172.25.191.151/nextcloud](http://172.25.191.151/nextcloud)', 'dbname' => 'nextcloud', 'dbhost' => 'localhost', 'dbport' => '', 'dbtableprefix' => 'oc_', 'mysql.utf8mb4' => true, 'dbuser' => 'USER_NAME', 'dbpassword' => 'PASSWORD', 'installed' => true, 'maintenance' => false, ); Thank you for your guidance! 2023年8月5日(土) 21:55 Vincent Stans via Nextcloud community <[noreply@nextcloud.com](mailto:noreply@nextcloud.com)>:
6

If you have no backup of your crashed NAS you lost all userdata.

no way to recover the files.

you could try occ files:scan to clean the database and start as new with all users intact.

Using the occ command — Nextcloud latest Administration Manual latest documentation

also make sure you have the correct permissions set on your new NAS

7

Right, I understand that I cannot recover the files. But all users have their own, so it should be fine once nextcloud resumed running.

I run
sudo -u www-data php /var/www/html/nextcloud/occ files:scan
I got
Starting scan for user 1 out of 8 (USER)
Home storage for user USER not writable

Although the data folder is:
drwxrwx— 2 www-data www-data
which I believe www-data has the correct permission.
(I just double-checked www-data is owner of apache)

files:cleanup or maintenance:repair
Didn’t help either.

8

you may need to create the username folders manually
I’m not in a state to test this but if you create a username folder USER and scan only for that user does it return a error.

are users able to login?

you permissions are correct.

9

When users connected to Nextcloud with desktop app, the username folders are created with only cache folder exist in it.
With information on other threads, I created files folder in the username folders.
Now at least files:scan works, but internal server error persists and no login page shows up.

While I checked /var/log/apache2/error.log, I found that there is error on finding avatar.

stat: cannot stat ‘/media/pi/nas/appdata_ocf6796ow8ds/avatar/USER/avatar.128.png’: No such file or directory

I created /media/pi/nas/appdata_ocf6796ow8ds/avatar/USER/ and run occ files:scan-app-data.
Then, nextcloud finally start working partially—
(1) browser works and I can login,
(2) files can be synced, if it is newly added. The files supposed to be on the data folder don’t sync.

It sounds like I need to clear what nextcloud think it has on the data folder.