Hi,
after few years of use of a personal nextcloudpi server, I’m switching on a third party platform with limitless space storage (it’s Aruba Drive, a big italian player on hosting market).
It use NextCloud platform with some limit: WevDAV is not supported, SFTP is not supported, login from nextcloudcmd is not supported.
Basically I can interact nly by web interface, or thorugh NextCloud Desktop Client standard interface.
I’ll like to use that space as a backup of huge archive of my photos work.
At the moment I’m using my personal nextcloudpi server with a rsync script on my macOS that make a mirror of my mounted disk on the nextcloudpi. I launch the script when I want to mirror, and it work really well.
This way is not accessible throug Aruba Drive service, and my “problem” actually is on the use of NextClout Desktop Client: in that interface there are no option to make the syncronization in one way only (from local to cloud), and I can’t schedule or launch at command the backup.
Do you think that in the future NCP client will support a sort of mirroring mode that break the 2 way syncronization and enable a 1 way mirroring?
It use NextCloud platform with some limit: WevDAV is not supported, SFTP is not supported, login from nextcloudcmd is not supported.
If the Nextcloud desktop client works you must have webdav access to the Nextcloud files? As far as I am aware the client works using webdav. e.g. your webdav address would look something like: https://example.tld/remote.php/dav/files/danardi
From there you can use something like rclone (as it’s multi-platform) to do a one-way sync.
*edit: re-reading your post I’m confused how/why nextcloudcmd wouldn’t work. It all uses the php webdav server built into Nexcloud for sync over webdav, at least as far as I am able to tell.
Thanks, but I have to confirm that at present webdav use is blocked by Aruba Drive.
Actually I don’t know why I’m unable to use nextcloudcmd: server refuse login.
Anyway it couldn’t solve my because I should set a script to schedule the backup, but actually it should ever a two way sync and not a backup
They must be doing something like user agent filtering in order to limit webdav access to only the official client. No idea why they would do that. That’s not really security, it’s security theater.
They don’t say they don’t support it because of security. They just say they don’t support it. Why? I don’t know. Maybe they want to avoid the extra traffic that it most likely would generate on their servers…?
@danardi if a provider or a service doesn’t fit your needs, you have to look for another provider. Also, Nextcloud is not the best choice for this usecase anyways. Nextcloud is intended as a collaboration solution, similar to Google Drive and M365, rather than as a target for backups.
I would recommend to use a service such as Backblaze B2 or Hetztner Storage Boxes for storing off-site backups. With these services, you will most likely get more storage per $ than with a hosted Nextcloud, and they also provide the appropriate APIs and/or protocols needed to perform proper backups.
Btw, a one-way sync without any revisions / snapshots isn’t a proper backup either. A true backup is an image of the original data at a specific point in time, which idelly is immutable.
Actually no, a simple user+pass access is in use now. I don’t know why nextcloudcmd return “AuthenticationRequiredError Host requires authentication”, I could investigate, but it can’t solve a backup procedure.
Interesting, I’ll take a look at this option
Actually no other service offer a limitless space at the price. I know how nextcloud works, my initial post was only to invite developers to add a simple option mode “one way sync”, but I understand that it couldn’t so simple.
I know, you are right. But a cloud backup is only a backup of local backup, and a simpler one is fine for me.
…and there you have your reason why they block WebDAV access, because If they would allow it, people would upload terrabytes of data via Rclone and other tools, like backups of their entire home lab, their Plex movie collections etc… There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Then you could also use the official client and sync the data you want to “backup” to a specific folder called “BACKUP DON’T TOUCH ME”, and then don’t touch that folder on the server. This would achive basically the same thing.
Maybe, but actually they sell this service specified for large backup archive “for your video and photos” (they say), so I think that they are ready for the mass upload.
They could limit bandwidth to avoid illegal use… but… I don’t know.
This is how actually I use, and I active specified folder only when I want to backup because if I work on the folder synced with nextcloud I have too many file duplied for conflict version.
It work, but it’s complex.
Illegal content is probably only part of the reason. Storage space is expensive, and people tend to take “unlimited” literally, so if they make it too easy to upload large amounts of data, then a service like that will become unsustainable pretty quickly. Again, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Well, ask them, if you need an official statement…
But of course that won’t change anything, and that’s exactly why I prefer companies like Backplaze or Hetzner that offer good value for money, rather than companies that advertise “unlimited” or “free” plans that at the end of the day, aren’t really free or unlimited or, as in this example, have other limitations which make it difficult or impossible to use them the way you want to use them.
For me the best alternative to Aruba Drive is to stay with my personal nextcloudpi. I would be happy to don’t care anymore to the maintenance of the server, HDs, and a low speed private connection. But it work great.
In my opinion if nextcloud team include the one-way-sync option on nextcloud client, we all will gain a new useful feature. That’s my point.
I could be wrong, but I don’t see them doing that any time soon, and in my opinion it’s not really needed either, because normally, if the provider doesn’t block WebDAV, you could simply use Rclone or any other tool that supports WebDAV.
But feel free, to open a feature request on Github, upvote / comment on existing feature requests, or even better, implementing the feature yourself, and create a pull request.
One-way sync is webdav. You mount the directory via webdav on your client machine. Viola, one way sync.
Then you have no ability to use the sync functionality of Nextcloud, which is built on top of webdav through clients.
Makes sense. There is nothing more to say on this thread, so closing this for now since the issues stem from Aruba and their decision to not support the basic sync and webdav functionality of Nextcloud. Best to you. If I am misunderstanding this thread it can be re-opened.
Click to read News app dev on why Nextcloud is not a backup system:
