Is Nextcloud for Home Enthusiasts or Home Experts?

[JasonBayton]

Hey,

You’re right, the NC devs don’t spend all of their time around here, and when they do they’re likely responding to something specific in one of the hundreds of mentions they get weekly. They are however very active on GitHub which is their day-to-day hangout given that’s where development and bug squashing is taking place.

There’s a distinction between “how do I install this properly” and “this isn’t working as expected” - the former is redirected to the community while the latter may be debugged here on the forum, but ultimately goes to GitHub to be properly tracked and resolved. If the devs were to spend more time here troubleshooting installation problems and general how-to questions, 12.0.1 likely wouldn’t be out for several more months.

Where your gripes come in, I guess, is that you’ve got issues there’s possibly 20-30+ topics discussing already and resolutions should be available (I’m assuming really as I didn’t catch your earlier topics), but it’s not so much a bug as an installation problem and therefore the community should be more than capable of resolving this; some of us have even written end-to-end guides like myself and @riegerCLOUD.

Not everyone in the community is here to try to resolve issues, which means there are fewer power users who get online when they can to help; though plenty we are, timezones, work and other life tasks that pay the bills get in the way (hence my seeing this now and not hours ago when it was posted), but it’s all free and if you’re proactive about your issue (posting and waiting days for example won’t get you far - judging by the amount of new topics that come in daily yours will get lost in hours, nevermind days) - by which I mean a couple of bumps to bring it back up to the top now and then (again making new topics, not the way to do this) will usually get someone’s attention.

To target some comments specifically:

@Tom_Forge

So I consulted the online documentation which did not provide a solution to move the user files out of the web root folder/subfolder structure. So I visited these forums and found a thread that discussed the issue and there was a myriad of advice on how to do it. All the advice was from folks way above my skill set level so there isn’t really a good way for me to discern, in a timely manner, which advice to follow in a timely manner.

These topics?

HowTo: Change / Move data directory after installation

Snap/Docker/VM users click here!

Note that this HowTo does not apply to Nextcloud containers/appliances or the official Nextcloud VM from <a href="https://www.hanssonit.se/nextcloud-vm/" rel="noopener nofollow ugc">Hansson IT</a>. If you use Nextcloud Snap, follow their official simple instructions: <a href="https://github.com/nextcloud/nextcloud-snap/wiki/Change-data-directory-to-use-another-disk-partition" class="inline-onebox">Change …

Is there a safe and reliable way to move data directory out of web root?

My installation seems to be working well, now I want to do a little bit to secure it. I have Nextcloud 10 on Ubuntu 16.04. It seems like the first thing I should do is move my data directory out of web root. I SO don’t want to break my installation. Is there a good tutorial on how to accomplish this and verify once complete that Nextcloud is still functioning properly? Thanks, and I have to say, I’ve been playing around with it and it’s fantastic, doing exactly what I was hoping.

There’d be nothing to stop you asking for the info provided to be simplified, @MichaIng would I’m sure love to incorporate that feedback into his guide if he was told, thus helping more people.

@Tom_Forge

I tried the Snap installation and it worked but I was worried that any advice I got to tweak Apache, MySQL, or even PHP would have to be interpreted for use with the Snap.

It’s not even a question of interpreting to be fair, the snap is read-only, meaning you can’t edit pretty much anything; this is mentioned in several topics (and by me many times). This is by design though, so as a new user you run a few commands and the snap runs autonomously… it’s the very point of the Nextcloud Box.

@Tom_Forge

Nextcloud itself seems to be around to pick up the pieces when the user community hasn’t attempted to help one of its newcomers?

See above, I guess. To add, on average we see >200 new topics a week, even if the small(ish) NC team did spend more time here picking up tickets, they couldn’t be expected to keep up with that pace.

@Tom_Forge

So I am wondering if in reality Nextcloud is not a solution for home users unless the home user is an experienced Apache website administrator, a pretty serious hacker, or working towards becoming a serious hacker?

Yes and no, experience helps but I’d refer back to the guides; plus should your topic(s) get picked up in the forum you’ll generally get step by steps there too. It’s worth keeping an open mind to the “home” definition too, the many thousands of installations on home networks is more than enough for NC to push it as a solution available for home users.

@Tom_Forge

Nextcloud should consider qualifying “home” use more up front or do something to make their claim more realistic by providing reasonably priced home support or having some folks on the payroll that primarily work with helping folks that the user community did not get to in a timely manner, say 48 hours or so.

Good suggestions. More about this is discussed here:

Support Cycle / Number of maintained versions

To get things clear: you mean, that with a support contract we could (if it goes the the way you think it should go) stay on e.g. NC 11 and you (the company I purchased the support contract from) would provide us with security-updates for that release for e.g. 10 years?

@Tom_Forge

Also, a support wiki that is version conscience would also help

Are you referring to the howto category with the relevant FAQs and such, or the official documentation? Because the latter certainly is version specific.