Summary
I accidentally deleted calendars after/while migrating owncloud to nextcloud. I’m trying to recover from a backup, but it’s hard and I might need help.
Background
System
Nextcloud version: 14.0.3
Operating system and version (eg, Ubuntu 17.04): NixOS unstable
Apache or nginx version (eg, Apache 2.4.25): nginx
PHP version (eg, 7.1): 7
Background information
- I recently upgraded Owncloud 9 -> Nextcloud 9 -> […] Nextcloud 14, and then migrated from Debian to NixOS.
- I then changed my hostname from www.mydomain.com/owncloud to nextcloud.mydomain.com.
- The upgrade itself worked great, and I can reach nextcloud fine under the new host.
Backups and tests
- I didn’t backup and test after each step, I only tested after I finished the whole migration.
- I still have the backup database from before the migration, when I had Nextcloud 14 on Debian.
Side notes (hopefully irrelevant)
In the beginning I wanted to support the old url with an nginx redirect, but there was a really strange bug in the owncloud desktop client, so I gave up on that eventually. I can explain the details if anyone thinks this is relevant.
The problem
How it happened
- I had problems syncing my calendars with DavDroid. It wouldn’t sync with the redirect to www.mydomain.com/owncloud in place.
- After deleting the old DavDroid account and creating a new one, it didn’t recognise the existing calendars
- To test, I created a new calendar from DavDroid. Possibly, I did something else. Now all my calendars are deleted.
Restoring from Backup
So I had a look at my backups and thought to myself “Basically, just a few rows from the database were dropped and a few were created. Find those, fix it, done.” But the reality looked a bit different.
sqlite3 current_database.db > dump_after_delete_calendar_20181105.sql
sqlite3 backup_database.db > dump.sql
Now comparing those dumps it looks like that they are almost completely different. They contain 80k and 60k lines each, and only share ~100 same lines or so.
Questions
-
Is it not recommended to simply copy the sqlite database file? (As opposed to dumping to SQL and recreating from SQL)? What could possibly go wrong? (Note, that’s how I migrated the database in the first place.)
-
Why is the SQL dump of the current database completely different from the dump of the former database?
a) How would I ever get the correct lines from the backup dump and insert those in the new database?
b) Is it safe to simply copy the old database and say "upgrade" or "maintenance:repair" or so?
