Migrate Nextcoud to a different server on shared hosting and change domain

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6

About 4.:

  • The oc_storages table contains the absolute path to the data directory. While Nextcloud indeed creates and effectively uses a new entry, when none is present that matches the config.php entry, it at least leaves the instance in an inconsistent state, and there is not guarantee that such a duplicate will always be supported. See this post from Joas: HowTo: Change / Move data directory after installation - #16 by nickvergessen
    The new entry get’s a new numeric_id, so if anything is actually using this ID, it would point to an invalid path then. Changing the path of the existing oc_storages entry shouldn’t be a big issue, especially since you have a backup, so simply do it :wink:.
  • The oc_filecache table contains the paths relative to the oc_storages path, for a user’s local storage more precisely relative to /path/to/nextcloud/data/<username>. It also contains a storage field containing the ID of the oc_storages entry it belongs to. For user’s local files however there are dedicated entries like home::<username> which automatically point to the path <username>/ relative to the local::/path/to/nextcloud/data entry in use. I.e. indeed the oc_filecache entries currently stay valid when changing config.php only.

About 2.:

  • I would go with a .tar archive to assure that all file modes and metadata are preserved, where I’m not sure whether this is guaranteed when copying all files individually via FTP. Not sure how practicable this is with the Nextcloud data (regarding the size of the tarball), another solution would be rsync (if supported by your hosting provider), where you can set a flag to explicitly preserve all metadata (rsync -a).

Otherwise your steps look fine. Moving a Nextcloud instance is no black magic and you leave the old instance in place until the new one has been verified working, hence go for it. If the domain name changes, then of course shared links and client connections/settings are invalidated, but you are aware of this already.

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