Is it possible to use 1 hard drive for 1 user?

[bfalkson]

Hello guys :),

im trying to setup a Nextcloud Server for multiple people. But in case the users save too much content im afraid that my hard disk wil be bigger and bigger and resulting of this, is harder to backup in time.

Because of this i thought about going with multiple hard drives and give every user 1 specific hard drive to write the data path to.

So i can set individual backup Routines per hard drive and can safe time on backing up the single drives.

Is someone having an idea for this procedure? Or maybe an alternative?

Thanks alot

[stefan-niedermann]

Hello and welcome to the community support forum

You could mount the hard drives on OS level to the corresponding user directory in your /data folder?

[KarlF12]

@bfalkson

im trying to setup a Nextcloud Server for multiple people. But in case the users save too much content im afraid that my hard disk wil be bigger and bigger and resulting of this, is harder to backup in time.

You might want to consider quotas to stay within your hardware capability.

@bfalkson

Because of this i thought about going with multiple hard drives and give every user 1 specific hard drive to write the data path to.

In theory you could mount a drive at the user’s data folder as was suggested, with correct permissions. I don’t know if a symlink will work.

[Vincent_Stans]

i found this post very interesting which may work for you aswell. though it’s a old post and I haven’t tries this on newer nc version.

@jelledj

sudo -u apache php occ files_external:create -c datadir=/mnt/nfs/home/\$user / local null::null

This will be the right answer to my own question, hope it helps others.

[wwe]

welcome to the forum @bfalkson

@bfalkson

in case the users save too much content im afraid that my hard disk wil be bigger and bigger and resulting of this, is harder to backup in time.

• it doesn’t make any difference on your backup times whether you backup one (big) drive or multiple small(er) drives, only the amount of data and the speed of the backup process are limiting factors
• the right method to limit users from adding too much content would be +quota" - the user can’t upload more data as allowed by the admin
• don’t forget Nextcloud files have related records in the DB - you need both for successful recovery

But is real life I don’t think backup should take significant time - after initial ramp up after user upload all the data into Nextcloud the data amount should remain almost the same, using good backup tool like restic or borg will only backup changed data so daily backup is not expected to take longer.

[flow-axel]

On a linux system, one way would be to mount each harddrive to the nextcloud/data/username folders.

For example:

mount /dev/sdb1 /var/www/nextcloud/data/user1

mount /dev/sdc1 /var/www/nextcloud/data/user2

mount /dev/sdd1 /var/www/nextcloud/data/user3

and so on…
Just the same way you can mount an external USB drive as /var/www/nextcloud/data/ folder, just one directory further