Mirroring of two nextcloud server

[anon75456558]

Pardon the copy pasta, but since I did just give a very thorough response on mirroring Nextcloud servers last week…

I agree that this is super important! It does not exist for us basic users at this time.
Your current best bet is to use Rclone to mirror your webdav data directory to another machine via rsync. Borg Backup has been scripted by some to help automate this process.

1. Request to optionally mirror federated data between instances as a remotely federated share will disappear from your instance if it goes offline. There needs to be an option for these shares to be mirrored in the webui since they already will be downloaded on any clients federating them…

2. IPFS, or InterPlanetaryFileSystem for Javascript, as external storage would allow Nextcloud users to mirror their data across multiple users, similar to seeding torrent files. See the external storage request here; there is a javascript implementation that could be adapted. It has been mentioned previously on GSOC 2017 and here discussing P2P file systems.

3. Request to support the Zot protocol, which is developed in PHP for Hubzilla and allows users to literally mirror and migrate their accounts across infinite trusted servers. This process is called Nomadic Identity and would completely reshape our use of Nextcloud in the best way possible! A dev from that project has even discussed the possibility on this forum before!
   HubZilla, an interesting selfhosted social network companion to your Nextcloud

Using Hubzilla to advance the development of Nextcloud federation

For those who have not heard of Hubzilla, it is an advanced platform for content publishing and social networking using a decentralized identity and permissions system. Hubzilla and Nextcloud are converging from their initially different starting points, and it would be beneficial for the two projects to begin seeing what they can learn from the other. Specifically, Nextcloud started with a focus on a robust web interface for storing personal data as well as apps to sync this data between devi…

Worth noting also that OpenCloudMesh (OCM) was announced by devs of the Nextcloud project in 2016 and is documented here. It does not specifically address mirroring data as discussed in the previous post, but it does relate to finding common federation protocols for all the various, enterprise file sharing projects like Nextcloud, Seafile, Filerun, etc.

Project github is located here, but has not been updated since mid-2017. However, Major federation improvements were added to the server in late 2018 via this Pull Request.

Nextcloud pushes forward Open Cloud Mesh API with proposal for 1.0 release

Originally published at: https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-pushes-forward-open-cloud-mesh-api-with-proposal-for-1.0-release/ [image] Nextcloud founders Frank Karlitschek and Bjoern Schießle invented the Federated Cloud Sharing API when still at ownCloud, and pushed the solution as a collaboratively developed standard under the Open Cloud Mesh initiative of the GÉANT Association, a European collaboration on e-infrastructure and services for research and education. Nextcloud formally joine…

Back in Nextcloud 12 it was announced that Global Scale architecture would be deployed to help scale up for large user case scenarios, but should be deployable on a minimum of two machines. This is designed for enterprise use, but it would address the kinds of questions you have for balancing between multiple servers. Not all of it has been implemented or documented so it is still more of a conceptual white paper.

The Global Site Selector app is available in the app store for setting a Master/Slave relationship between multiple servers.
Lookup Server is being developed as well, but I think it needs additional documentation.
Balancer part of Global Scale does not yet exist, or is not yet being developed as part of Nextcloud’s overall Github.

Taken from this old forum post, these three things accomplish the following:

Global Site Selector

The Global Site Selector (GSS) acts as a central instance that is accessed by the user during the first login, accessing it via the Web, WebDAV or REST. The GSS authenticates the user via the central user management like for example LDAP. It then looks up the node where the user is located in the lookup server and redirects the user to the right hostname. The following calls during the same session are done directly from client to the node.

Lookup Server

The lookup server stores the physical location of a user. It can be queried using a valid user id to fetch the federated sharing id of a user. In some situations, it is important to limit queries to a certain IP space to avoid data leaks. It also keeps track of old federated sharing IDs. The lookup server stores additional data of the users like for example the required QoS metrics like storage/quota settings, speed class, reliability class and so on.

Balancer

The Balancer runs on a dedicated machine, monitoring the various nodes and their storage, CPU, RAM and network utilization. It can mark nodes as online or offline and initiate the migration of user accounts to different nodes based on data in the Lookup Server like business or legal requirements, QoS settings or user location. If for example, a user would move from the US to Europe, the Balancer would initiate a migration from their data to an EU data center to improve the quality of service.

You can learn more details on our webpage about Global Scale.