Migrate and Update - best route sought

[BM-ES]

Hi there,
I’ve inherited a significantly out of date Nextcloud instance (v25.0.0) on an end-of-life Ubuntu server and need to both migrate to a new server (likely to be Rocky Linux) and hopefully fully upgrade it to latest version.

I’ve found both the upgrading instructions and the server migration instructions and initially planned to keep the two activities separate, but I then noticed in the upgrade instructions there is something that says “if you want to downgrade, install the downgraded version and restore the data into it” suggesting you can backup and restore data into a Nextcloud running at a different version (ours would be an upgraded version, not a downgraded one).

So is our best route likely to be numerous in-situ upgrades until we’ve reached latest version, and then a migration of that to the new server? Or might an option to be to install latest version on new server and backup/restore from much older version into it.

Additionally, the backup/restore note talks about four distinct items to backup and restore - data, database, config and themes. But the downgrade note says “…make a new, fresh installation and then restore your data from backup”. Suggesting (if it’s using the word ‘data’ in the same sense) that you don’t restore the database, config or themes. The latter two I can understand in a fresh installation, but the database? Or is it expecting that you will set up users and such like from scratch in the destination instance at an upgraded/downgraded version?

I’m well versed in Linux but new to Nextcloud so forgive any poorly worded questions in that regard.

Any thoughts on this very welcome before I start work on it.

[wwe]

hi @BM-ES welcome to the forum

please use search this topic has been discussed multiple time. e.g. few days ago:

Migrating and upgrading at the same time into a new/upgraded NC instance

Please search the forum, this topic has been discussed far too often already server_migration In short: There is no way to migrate to a different version either upgrade the old one until latest or migrate first and upgrade the destination system you can mix and match steps 2 and 3 as you want or even use an intermediate system like VM or docker to perform intermediate upgrades and only migrate the last version to the destination system.

you will find most of the topic tagged with server_migration

[BM-ES]

Thanks Willi much appreciated.

I did try to search first but I’m new to the forum so hadn’t found the tag I’d needed which I now see works well.

I’ll proceed via the upgrade route as you say.

That had always been my plan, however it does definitely say in the upgrade notes “If you want to revert to an older Nextcloud version, make a new, fresh installation and then restore your data from backup” which is very much suggestive of the fact that you can migrate to a different version, hence the question.

Kind Regards and thanks again for the quick response.

[wwe]

@BM-ES

“If you want to revert to an older Nextcloud version, make a new, fresh installation and then restore your data from backup” which is very much suggestive of the fact that you can migrate to a different version, hence the question.

Maybe the wording is not 100% accurate but “restore from backup” always implies restoring to the same software version. Not many applications can restore backup from different version and for Nextcloud this is definitely not the case.