I am currently running my Nextcloud server on a very old and underpowered embedded Atom D510 system with a few 4TB drives in a zfs storage pool.
It’s been chugging along happily for a number of years, initially running on Ubuntu 14.04. I did upgrade it to 16.04 and had a hell of a time getting everything up and running again.
The server also runs a few Samba shares and a Plex server, but I can’t see these proving to be much of a problem in my plans.
I have recently upgraded my own workstation and was planning to use my old Ryzen 2400G (or possibly even upgrade it to a 3700x) as the basis for a new server.
My plan is to virtualise my actual server so that I can have backups of the entire install, meaning I can upgrade everything safe in the knowledge that I can roll it back until I can troubleshoot the problem.
I haven’t even upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04 yet, let alone 20.04 because if (when) something breaks, I have no idea how long it’ll take me to fix it. IIRC, the issue with the upgrade to 16.04 was the MySql database, and while I got it all going in the end, it did take a while.
I use my Nextcloud to sync my calendar, phone contacts and have files in there I need for work regularly, so putting off a repair of a broken system until I have time to look at it at the weekend isn’t always practical.
That’s an awful lot of waffle, but my question is, how easy or difficult is it going to be to yank my zpool drives out of my old server, get the zpool up and going on my new server, and tell the new Nextcloud instance to import the data so it’s ready to go again?
I’ll have a lot of other work to do (not least deciding on whether I want to present the actual zpool to the VM or just give it a shared folder from the host, and whether I want to have a second VM to run the sql server which is usually the only piece of my entire server I have issues with (usually following an unexpected power cut while I’m out of the house) but what I want to know is, is there an easy method of just (once the new Nextcloud install can see the files from the existing install) migrating all the data across without me physically aving to copy it to a temporary storage location then back again into the new server?