Migrating with big version jump

🚧 Installation
1

Greetings, programs!

There are actually two separate issues for me, but one may pretty much be considered a subset of the other, so I decided to keep them together. :innocent:

I have kinda “inherited” a pretty old Nextcloud installation: 13.0.2. This needs an update, I know. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: But going through all the steps to get it to the current version will take ages and will cause at least one other problem: The db will be missing a lot of fields (those added in newer versions of NC). The installation is on a shared hosting server. I have shell access but no su-rights (of course). This means, updating the system and running the rather lengthy script to update the db is not really an option. I have asked the ISP if they would run it for me, but the response I got from the support was somewhat less than enthusiastic - meaning, if they do it (at all), it will cost me, they will not do it again should it fail, but they don’t really want to do it anyway because it will use a bunch of system resources. This was their response (the short version), I have no idea how well the script works and how much CPU-time it requires.

There are a lot of files saved on the system, but they are all backed up, so there is no issue there. I can backup the db via phpMyAdmin, but I am not sure if that actually solves much, because:

My plan was to install a squeaky new Nextcloud on the same server and somehow transfer the data from the old installation to the new one. The files are easy enough, but what about the phone book(s) and calendars etc.? Just creating a backup of the db via phpMyAdmin won’t create the missing fields.

Is there any way of doing this outside of the webserver? A day or two of offine time (aka maintenance mode) is no problem. Does anyone have a suggestion or a link or two for me?

Thanks and cheers!
Chris

2

You can migrate setups, so you can migrate it to a local server (or in a virtual machine), do all the upgrades and then move everything back to the external server. What you have to be careful about is that you always use the supported php versions, with php 7.2 you should get up to NC 20.
Perhaps you could even do it without the data itself (except if you use the server-side encryption…).

Depends as what you login. If you login as the same user as the webserver user (the one who is owner of the files and scripts), you don’t need the su-stuff. This is only when you login as root and want to execute commands as www-data. So perhaps it is possible to upgrade directly on your server.

3

Well, I did manage to get the installation up to 20.0.7 (which is the current stable). I was lucky enought to get a friendly dude in second level support to help me out. It turned out, that “normal” users have shell access but don’t get to start any php scripts because when starting these from the shell, the restrictions concerning CPU-cycles no longer apply and thus a user could slow the system to a crawl. This is the explanation I was given, so don’t go nuts because you think it’s dumb - because I’d agree with you. :rofl:

After the update the calendar and the syncing is giving me some grief, but because that is more of a separate issue, I’ll start a new thread for this.

Thanks for reading and helping!

Cheers!
Chris