I think you are missing a point here. Backing up Nextcloud usually needs to cover a lot more files and data than your small pihole installation. When it comes to these sizes, timeouts and other parameters become huge problems. This is popbably one of the reasons why the backup app is not working as it should. Because of that and other reasons, I would always recommend tools for this that are extra written for this usecase and already well proven like borg, restic or other tools. These are unfortunately not really meant to be executed directly from a Nextcloud PHP process.
Thinking about export/import of data: maybe you could find the new user migration feature of Nextcloud 24 useful!
Tiny Tiny RSS or Pihole have a manual backup function for the settings and the feeds respectively. This means that in case of a disaster you can re-install the application and then import the settings and feeds again. Nextcloud also has this to a certain extent. You can already export calendars and contacts. The files can also be backed up relatively easily using standard tools for file operations provided by your operating system. But in all cases you have to do a lot of manual work before you can use such a backup, depending on what exactley went wrong of course. For example, with TT-RSS you have to manually set up all users again before you can restore the backup of the feeds. With Pi-hole there are no users, there it is obviously a lot simpler.
And as others have said, efforts are being made by both the Nextcloud GmbH itself and the community to make data migration and data recovery easier. Unfortunately it’s just not that simple, because Nextcloud covers a lot of use cases and there are many third party apps and integrations, which means hardly any installation is exactly the same as the next one.
One things I like about VM and clones is simplicity. However, if you change hardware and restore to new hardware this could also create failure to restore. Even if the hard drive accepts the clone it might not boot or load correctly at all.
I can see a benefit in learning how to migrate, backup and clone so you know you have your data and you can get it onto the new hardware no matter what happens.
I have some reading to do before I understand how to do all these things but for now I’ll export the VM at least that.
With VM I can see a benefit since the actual hardware is irrelevant.
So time for some reading / lessons on backups it would seem.
Thanks all
I Think I’m looking for the same as you did. I have found the documentation about Nextcloud AIO backup solution, but I’, not sure if a “restoration point” will save EVERYTHING, meaning configuration of the system, system files, users files, the database, etc.
