Nextcloud desktop client can't access external drive on Ubuntu

šŸ“± Desktop & mobile clients šŸ’» Desktop
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Nextcloud version (eg, 20.0.5): Latest one, downloaded yesterday
Operating system and version (eg, Ubuntu 20.04): 20.04.3 LTS

The issue you are facing:
I have a working Nextcloud server and a working Windows desktop client syncing succesfully.
Iā€™m trying to add an Ubuntu machine to my setup but when I try to use the desktop client for my Ubuntu installation, I get a ā€œcould not read the contents of Mydriveā€ ā€œpermission deniedā€ error when I try to select my external hard disk as the drive to sync to.

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permissions denied

Youā€™ll need to google and adjust your permissions since you cannot write/read to that drive.
The issue is between Ubuntu and your external disk.

edit: I find your explanation extremely vague & confusing, so might have misunderstood what you are asking.

3

@Ecation
I understood your problem somehow differently than @just . Maybe you can post some screenshots.

4

Hi!

Here are some images:
Step 1 I have installed the client and next I will try to set up a folder:
step1

Step 2: I get an error message when trying to select my external hard drive as the target folder:
step2

The problem in a nutshell is that I canā€™t use my external hardisk with the Nextcloud client. My operating system is Ubuntu.
I also think itā€™s a permissions problem, but I have no idea what do to. The only search results were about configuring the server, but this is about the client.

5

Look up external mount disk permissions

Youā€™ll want to edit fstab with the proper permissions. Or re-mount r/w as linked

example
Your disk is known to the system as /dev/sdb1 and is mounted read-only (the ro between brackets). Moreover, it is NTFS (which the mount command reports as fuseblk).
Unmount your disk and re-mount it as read-write, like this:

sudo umount /dev/sdb1
sudo mkdir /mnt/mydisk
sudo mount -t ntfs -o rw /dev/sdb1 /mnt/mydisk
6

Thank you for your help.
I feel like I donā€™t know Linux well enough, things that seem so simple to others give me a lot of trouble.
I think my external hard disk is at /dev/sdc2 and the type of it says ā€œMicrosoft basic dataā€
It also has a red text saying ā€œPartition 1 does not start on physical sector coundaryā€.

I ran what you suggested (I hope I modified it correctly to use sdc2 instead of sdb1), but now the external hard disk disappeared from the other locations list. I donā€™t know where it went. Edit: Found it now under mnt/mydisk. But when I try to browse to /mnt/ with Nextcloud instead of the regular Ubuntu file browser, I get another ā€œError opening directory ā€˜/mntā€™: Permission deniedā€.

When I right click on my external hard disk and choose ā€œpropertiesā€ it says that the file system type is ā€œfuseā€. Could that be a problem since you mentioned ā€œfuselbkā€?

7

I wonā€™t be able to help you further as I do not use NTFS partitions or anything similar from Microsoft for many years. Good luck. Others with more recent experience should be able to assist you with your permissions.

8

Would it help if I formatted my hard disk to a different format? Which format would you recommend?

9

Most common format in a standard linux distribution would be ext4
NTFS format support for Windows was recently added into Linux kernel, but not arriving until kernel 5.15

10

Hi!

I formatted the disk as Ext4 now but I still get the very same permissions error. :confused:

Am I the only one having permission errors with external disks and the Nextcloud client on Linux?

11

You have to define the permissions that the disk will use.

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Hi!

Thanks again!

I turns out I could fix the problem by removing the Nextcloud client that I installed from the Ubuntu Software center. Instead I installed the version that is recommended on the Nextcloud documentation page. I used the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nextcloud-devs/client

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt install nautilus-nextcloud
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