I’m not very familiar with Nextcloud.
I work in a small teaching lab for struggling young students.
The goal is to teach kids (14-17 years old) how to work in a corporate environment. Almost all of them have never even worked on a PC, only with smartphones.
That’s why we decided to create shared folders that simulate the departments in a fictional company: Administration, Production, Sales.
The kids also have their own personal folder.
A Samba AD DC, Nextcloud, or Collabora architecture seemed the most functional.
So, there’s Ubuntu Server, ZFS, Samba AD DC, and Docker.
Nextcloud + Collabora with Docker is installed in a pool on an NVMe mirror.
On a second RAIDZ3 pool, I created work folders and personal folders.
Nextcloud is configured to view both via SMB/CIFS. Each user sees their personal folder and the folders they have permissions to.
The first problem is that Nextcloud’s default folder is set to NVMe, and everyone is saving there. This happens because if someone opens Collabora to generate a document, Nextcloud immediately sets the default folder.
The second problem is that if I create the document directly from a folder using the “+New” button, other errors appear.
Not knowing Nextcloud, I searched online, but I didn’t find anything useful.
Even with the help of an AI (Cloud, Gemini, ChatGPT), I’m just going around in circles, wasting time.
Thanks for any advice.
Ubuntu Server 25.10
Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring (34.0.0)
Installed with Docker “Alpine”
Hello @Dark_Corner,
welcome to the Nextcloud community
You’ve posted a request in the support section. Unfortunately you have not completed the required support template. Please edit your post and add as much information as possible so that community supporters have the necessary technical information to help you resolve your issue!
Without additional information the community members cannot help you.
Nextcloud stores files in a “DATADIR” - docker variants allow configuration of this directory via ENV variables. quick search in a docs will tell you how to define it.
Additionally I would recommend to simplify your setup - learning instance should be easy and follow as many defaults as possible to avoid friction and allow users to rely on internet search and docs rather some specific implementation.
As an alternative to what @wwe suggested (moving the Nextcloud data directory to another storage), you could also provide external SMB shares to your users via the External Storage app. You could then set a storage quota for user accounts to prevent them from filling up the NVMe drive. You could even set the quota to zero bytes, meaning users wouldn’t be able to store anything in their personal storage and would instead have to use the SMB shares.
AFAIK, Collabora doesn’t have a default folder, and neither is there a way to set one. It simply stores the document in the folder you’re currently viewing when you create a document via the “New” button. So if you want to create a document in a specific folder, you first need to navigate to that folder and click on the “New” button there.
