I realize I kinda rambled on this post. TLDR at the bottom.
So this is my very first time getting into self hosted stuff. It’s great, but also quite confusing. I grabbed an old PC I had lying around and converted it to a server and decided to install Nextcloud on it since I wanted to try it out. Problem is, since I’m inexperienced I seem to have screwed something up, and Nextcloud is acting kinda odd. It worked fine at first, but after a few days I have noticed more and more issues and now it’s half broken, but I already have uploaded a lot of data to it.
My server is running Arch Linux since that’s what I’m comfortable with and in my experience it has been very reliable, so I don’t feel like using Debian or Ubuntu or something of the sorts. Since Arch is kind of an odd choice for a server, there’s not many tutorials out there that target Arch specifically. There is this one however, which I followed to the tee and produces… an internal server error.
The problem with this install is that since then, Nextcloud now uses it’s own “nextcloud” user, instead of “http”, so there’s permission errors. I solved it by changing the permissions of the nextcloud folders to “http”, but I guess that’s the wrong way since they come back to “nextcloud” after a few days.
I’ve read that I should be using nextcloud’s user, so I guess I’ll keep it like that from now on.
I am also using nginx as my webserver, and mariadb for the database.
Well, so what issues I’m facing? Well, the icons for the default apps are gone (dashboard, files, photos and activities) but the ones I installed myself are there, oddly enough 
The logging menu is completely broken and blank, the server feels slow and sluggish, and the contacts app cannot save twice for the same contact. If I save once, then I need to reload the contact before I can save again. Also the background for the dashboard doesn’t load anymore, there’s more icons missing in the settings, I cannot change settings from the menu.
It’s generally acting very strange…
I fired up a VM and did it all again. This time, I followed the Arch Wiki, and the results were much better. I did have to do some more digging and understand things properly, but at least it works, and it’s much faster and working without issues.
So I just want to be done with this frankenstein, reinstall the whole system, and reinstall nextcloud as I have learned to do now. But, I don’t want to lose my data. Can I just copy the data from the data folder and paste it on the new install? Will that work?
TLDR:
- Arch Linux
- nginx
- Mariadb
- Setup is a mess, want to reinstall, need to transfer data to new install. How?