New server and migration - DNS flip

Hey!

First off - love the NC passwords app. It truly is awesome. Thank you for developing and maintaining this.

I plan on moving my on-premise home server to a VPS as my server is having issues and the electricity bill is crazy (old server).

I understand that there is a guide to a general passwords migration but I thought of a easier way? But maybe I’m dreaming…

Could I just set up a new instance of NC, install passwords on this new instance…then when I flip DNS to the new server, will the passwords on my android app just sync to the new server? I’m basic in regards to IT so I apologize if this is naive.

Thanks!!

No, that won’t work.

When you switch to a new server, all clients that use an app password will lose access to your account, even if you used the same password.
All apps & extensions for passwords that I know do use app passwords.

Most apps don’t store passwords locally and also don’t recreate them if they’re missing on the server. If that was the case, anyone who could temporarily control your DNS would get a free list of everyone’s passwords with it. That would be bad.

The best way to move servers is to follow the manual.

I think the official server migration guide is the right point to start

https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/stable/admin_manual/maintenance/migrating.html

Gotcha! Thank you - that makes sense.

I don’t feel confident in my skills to migrate a database and edit config files. I’m just your average joe, honestly. This is going to sound pathetic, but I’m probably going to just download all my pictures and documents to my computers, then delete all instances of next cloud. I’ll then just re-upload everything. Basically starting from scratch.

With Passwords, honestly I’m just going to write them down and just recreate everything.

Again - pathetic but I’d rather do it this way where I know I won’t screw it up.

I have server end-to-end encryption set up so I just feel like I’d screw something up!

@Jamesmhaywood
Great. It is good to improve the knowledge.
And: backup, backup, backup … and test restore, restore, restore
Make a backup of your passwords in a second way if you nextcloud, backup, restore completly goes wrong.

But you do know that the passwords app also has a handy export which you can use to export your passwords as CSV or JSON and import them on a new instance.

nothing is wrong with your approach if you feel well throwing lot of work and loosing all you shares (if any) and other meta-data…

I never get e2e App to work, but from what I understand there should be no problem if you migrate the server and flip DNS: e2e keys are stored locally, metadata of the server matches and there is no good reason it should fail… and in general - as @devnull stated already - no only for this case - you should be prepared to restore your server for whatever reason like hardware fail or malware attack. a migration gives you a good chance to test backup and restore to different hardware without touching your old installation.