Moving group folder to another disk

KarlF12 · October 1, 2023, 4:54pm

Support intro

Sorry to hear you’re facing problems

help.nextcloud.com is for home/non-enterprise users. If you’re running a business, paid support can be accessed via portal.nextcloud.com where we can ensure your business keeps running smoothly.

In order to help you as quickly as possible, before clicking Create Topic please provide as much of the below as you can. Feel free to use a pastebin service for logs, otherwise either indent short log examples with four spaces:

example

Or for longer, use three backticks above and below the code snippet:

longer
example
here

Some or all of the below information will be requested if it isn’t supplied; for fastest response please provide as much as you can

Nextcloud version (eg, 20.0.5): 26.0.7
Operating system and version (eg, Ubuntu 20.04): Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS
Apache or nginx version (eg, Apache 2.4.25): Apache/2.4.52 (Ubuntu)
PHP version (eg, 7.4): PHP 8.2.8
Nextcloud installation type:

Official Docker container (not AIO)
Docker 24.0.5
Docker Compose version v2.20.2

The issue you are facing:

I have a group folder that has grown quite large, and I need to move it to a new disk I’m adding to the system. I’ve thought of a couple ways I might do this such as symlinking the group folder or replacing it with a rebind mount. Before I take a stab at it, I was wondering if anyone has attempted this and happens to know if Nextcloud will have a problem with me doing it one way or the other?

If necessary I could also mount it as external storage, but I’m trying not to rock the boat too much because I have other computers that access this group folder via WebDAV.

This is assuming I maintain the file timestamps, the path under the NC data folder does not change, and correct permissions are maintained on the new location.

Thanks

just · October 1, 2023, 6:00pm

github.com/nextcloud/groupfolders

Allow custom storage location per group folder

opened 09:07AM - 02 Feb 18 UTC

klada

enhancement 0. Needs triage

Hi, at the moment all group folders are created flat under `$CONFIG["datadire…ctory"]/__groupfolders` . For larger-scale Nextcloud instances it is common to split files across multiple network shares (such as NFS shares). For the groupfolders app it would be sufficient if at least one hierarchy level could exist between the actual group folder (represented by the folder's id in the filesystem) and the `__groupfolders` root. Let me give an example. This is the current state for two different group folders: ``` __groupfolders/ ├── 2 │ └── dfsfsdfsd.txt └── 3 └── empty.txt ``` And I think that this state would be very desirable for bigger instances: ``` __groupfolders/ ├── nfs-share-01 │ └── 2 │ └── dfsfsdfsd.txt └── nfs-share-02 └── 3 └── empty.txt ``` This has multiple benefits: - Additional space can be provided by simply adding another share from potentially another storage system - Spreading IOPS across multiple storage systems (this is a big thing when dealing with many group folders) This has some implications though: - The location of each group folder would need to be configured (additional field in `oc_group_folders` table). This would mean that the Admin GUI and the API need to be extended. - People might want a `move` command later to move a group folder from one filesystem location to another I have already played a bit with the PHP code and from what I see there are only three things that would need to be changed: - The `database.xml` (obviously, as we need another field) - `MountProvider::getFolders($id)` would need to look up the actual storage path in the database - The SQL query in `FolderManager::getAllFolders` would need to be changed for correct size calculations What do you think of this improvement?

KarlF12 · October 2, 2023, 1:20am

Those links weren’t related to what I needed to do. I think I’ve got it figured out. I used rsync to make a mirror copy of the group folder on the new disk and then substituted it for the original by mounting it to data/__groupfolders/5 in docker-compose.yml. That appears to have worked. I’ll post again if I find out in the next couple days something had gone awry.

I did notice under Settings > Administration > System, it’s reporting the storage of this secondary mount instead of the original, which is a little bit strange. That subfolder mount should be transparent to Nextcloud.