New to Nextcloud

Hello everyone. A few questions if I may. I am going to try my hand at installing Nextcloud on a Lenovo ThinkServer TS140 that I have collecting dust. Specs:

Boot disk = 256GB SSD drive
Storage = 2 x Western Digital Gold 2 Terabytes each.

The two WD drives were in a Windows system (NTFS I believe). One is blank and the other has some data on it (nothing important). I do not mind clearing both drives if need be.

Is there any special preparation required for the two storage drives prior to the Ubuntu / NC installation?

How do I get NC to recognize saif storage drives once I am done with the NC install?

Thank you in advance. Safe and Happy Holidays to all. Peter

Hello @Sanook Thank you so much for the prompt response. In the initial stages of my Ubuntu 20.04 install I chose to format my two additional WD drives as ext4. I have completed the NC installation and must figure out how to attach the two WD drives so that I may use them as storage.

Just add a folder there and adjust 'datadirectory' => '/path/to/your/storage' in config.php

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@peterbatah
I think you can use NTFS as local external storage .

Add NTFS drive as external storage

I think datadirectory (primary storage) does not work. But i do not use Windows i have never tested it.

Thank you. The drives are now formatted as ext4. I want to use both those drives as storage. And have the 256GB SSD drive for the OS only.

Don’t both these drives have to be mounted first. And then there is the question of assigning permissions. Thanks again

Are they not already mounted?

mount|grep ^/dev

I am not sure to be honest with you. As I said in my earlier post I should see my boot drive and it’s partitions and the 2 Two Terabyte sata drives which I formatted as ext4 in the initial install phase

Mount Check

And this when I run fdisk -l

fdisk -l

I would create a RAID1 array of those 2 harddisks and use it at primary data storage for Nextcloud. But to be honest this is not really a Nextcloud related question and i would suggest to ask in an Ubuntu forum.

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I have been reading quite a bit and have followed some instructions / tutorial. I have now gone as far as mounting the drive / directory. I called it TERA-1. However, I cannot create / delete / modify / upload. I get a “Forbidden” message. Obviously, this sounds like a permissions issue

External Storage Permissions

Everything is explained in the link what @devnull has provided.

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You’ll want to start by wiping these and setting them up in a RAID mirror. Either hardware or software RAID is fine.

You’ll need to place Nextcloud’s data folder under where you have the disk array mounted.

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@KarlF12 Thank you for your input. I am very new to Linux (obvious by now). I have been doing a lot of reading and YT videos. But, I still have a ways to go. Mainly in the area of mounting drives / external storage setup and so forth. This is what I have done and see so far. Your ime and assistance is greatly appreciated. Peter

blkid
df -h

fdisk -l

If you aren’t comfortable with Linux yet, you might consider working on that before getting too far into Nextcloud. Every installation is a little bit different, so it’s important to know your own system so you can customize the installation to fit.

As far as drive mounting, the process will be notably different between hardware vs. software RAID. In particular that hardware RAID is not having to do with Linux but depends on your server. Hardware RAID is typically managed in a pre-boot option ROM built into the server’s RAID controller. For software RAID it’s easiest to set up during OS installation, assuming your distro does that.

Then for the actual mount point, you could keep it simple and just mount it to /var, but there are many “correct” places you could mount it. Look over some documentation of the Linux filesystem hierarchy and think about what part(s) of your system you want to be large and fault tolerant vs. fast with no seatbelt.

And do remember to back it up regularly… I would have a plan in place for that up front.

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I believe that I have properly setup software RAID1 on my 2 (2xTB drives). So, I guess it is on to the part where I learn how to mount said drives / partitions. Thank you again for your time and guidance.

You will need to partition and format it before mounting as well. Or set it up for LVM, however you want to do it.

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Hello,

first of all, welcome to the Nextcloud world, I am sure you will enjoy it!

About the installation and configuration, maybe it is better to start from the beggining checking what you have there and what is not. What is the output of ‘lsblk’ as root? That should give you the disks and where they are mounted.

Also, I think it is important for you prepare your design in advance. You already said that you are going to use RAID 1, which is good as you will have a duplicate environment. However if you are new to Linux and these kind of environments maybe it is easier for you just have 2 separate disks and perform on daily (or 12 hours) basis a copy to the second disk through rsync command. With this approach your second disk would be most of the day stopped so it should have longer life, as I assume that you are not using disks designed to be working as 24/7, like WD Red NAS ones.

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Good point with the 24/7 hardware. Please do consider your HDDs won’t last forever. Make backups and test them!

RAID0 will only protect you from the first disk error, and only if you detect it quick enough. A second error occuring on the other disk may kill all your data.
RAID0 is no backup and no good protection against bit-rot.

If you’re up for a steeper learning curve, but probably an easier-to-maintain system (in the long run), maybe consider deploying TrueNAS Core.
https://www.truenas.com/truenas-core/

For example, if you find another small SSD (or HDD) for the system, you could put your 2xHDD into a RAID-Z and have the larger SSD as L2ARC (read-cache).

You would install NextCloud as a natively supported plugin in the TrueNAS OS.

There is a rather large community, e.g. on reddit.

If you’re interested in learning about Linux and running Nextcloud is your motivation, then by all means listen to the other posts in this thread.

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