I’ve only really joined to say thank you to @nachoparker for nextcloudpi (or nextcloudplus, honestly I’m not too sure with name changes in the FOSS world any more).
I’m an experienced sysadmin with probably 20 years’ actual production experience under my belt; in truth I’m slowly losing track of all the various bits of software I’ve worked with, all of them similar but different enough to be confusing. Real life has taken its toll on me over the last few years and I no longer have the spare brain capacity for extended home projects.
I was running Nextcloud 15 or 16 on a VM, and it mostly worked well enough until the encrypted disk it lived on went up in smoke. It was never anywhere near fast enough, and no immediately obvious poking of redis or php-fpm or other caching engines (I forget which now) would seem to make it snappy.
On a whim I restored the backup to an instance of nextcloudpi running on a debian instance on the same hardware, and it was immediately fast. I didn’t really need to think too much about anything, and even setting up the LetsEncrypt stuff was trivial (previously it wasn’t too hard either being managed by ACME scripts).
In short, everything Just Worked ™, and it worked simply and quickly. The end result is faster, and therefore significantly better for my family (the users). My pretty paranoid backup policy (rsync to multiple locations controlled by crontab, mostly!) meant I didn’t lose any data, and once it was installed I didn’t have to think too much, and I can go back to sleep.
Thank you.
If I had some more opinions about the project, I’d like to see some more control over the backups, such as scheduling and/or compression; I’d often use bzip2/lzip or similar for backups (offsite link is very low bandwidth), or perhaps rsnapshot being integrated.
I’d also like to see better documentation on restoring that backup because it’s not immediately clear whether copying over the Nextcloud data directory is enough, whether you need a database to be copied too, or whether the copies of the two need to be taken at the same time.
Other than that, great!