NextcloudPi: Upgrade of RPi 3 to 4

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1

Hi all,

Hope I hit the correct forum; if not apologies.

My question: I am running NextcloudPi for a few years on a RaspberryPi 3. I recently bought another Rpi4 and intending to use this for NextcloudPi going forward given its additional horsepower compared to Rpi3.

Is there any recommended way in upgrading to avoid a new installation? Considering also attached USB disks, where the data and backup is stored?

Or is it simple about using existing SD card and USB hard-disk (including doing a backup) and doing an update of the software?

Any tips much appreciated.

Regards and have a good weekend,
Joe

2

Do a sd backup, then a dist upgrade to buster if you didnt yet, then replace the raspberry and it should work with the old sdcard.

3

Thanks, FadeFx. Did as suggested, but without success so far. I cannot get the thing to boot on the RPi4 (but still works on RPi3 luckily).

What I did so far:

  • Backup of SD (success)
  • Upgrade to Buster (success)
  • Extended /boot parition to +500mb (success, althoug had to recreate the parition)
  • Tried to boot on RPi4, no success
  • Copied RPi4 kernel image and bcm* files over, but didn’t work either (although USB disks got power somehow this time)

Any tips much appreciated (as always).

Thanks,
Joe

4

After some further search, I updated the kernel (again), which installed the appropriate kernel for RPi4 incl. the 64bit experimental version via apt (and not manual as above):

sudo apt install --reinstall raspberrypi-bootloader raspberrypi-kernel

Although this run successful, I still cannot to get the RPi up and running (RPi3 still works fine). Any other potential things I might miss?

5

Did you try rpi-update ? https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update

6

Do u use the same power supply that you used for the Rpi 3? Afaik these may m0be too weak/incompatible with the Rpi 4 and could be the reason it does not boot

7

Any success yet?

8

So finally Sunday and I had some time to do some further tests.

Power Supply: Yes, using the official power supply for Rpi4.

rpi-update: I ran that via a prepared Raspbian-SD successful. I can now get the RPi4 to start with the nextcloudpi image/SD card. Great, many thanks for that tip. Much appreciated.

I hit now the next barrier, which seems to be common, that eth0 does not come up at all on RPi4 after upgrading from elder versions… haven’t found a solution yet doing some very quick research, but looks like this is the next step for me.

Really appreciate your tips so far. Thank you.

9

Hi I’m in a similar position, though with less experience. I have recently set up and populated nextcloudpi on a Rpi3+hdd1 and would like to move it to a Rpi4+hdd2 (a different, larger disk). How about the following plan:

  1. Connect an extra disk, hdd3 to the Rpi3.
    1a. update the Rpi3+hdd1 nextcloudpi to the current version
  2. Use nc-backup on Rpi3 to backup the configuration, database and data to hdd3
  3. Shutdown the Rpi3, boot up Rpi4+hdd2 and give it the same IP address as the Rpi3 had.
  4. Make a fresh, bare bones install of nextcloudpi on the Rpi4+hdd2
  5. Reconnect hdd3 to the Rpi4.
    5a. update the Rpi4+hdd2 nextcloudpi to the current version
  6. Use nc-restore in the bare bones installation to trample over and replace the configuration, database and data on Rpi4+hdd2
  7. Optionally, keep hdd3 mounted on the Rpi4 as a destination for future backups/snapshots of the configuration, database and data.
    By way of preparation, I’ll play around with the bare-bones install on the Rpi4+hdd2 to make sure that backup/restore and snapshot work as I hope.

Suggestions most welcome.

10

Ha. Failed at step 2. My attempt to use nc-backup on Rpi3+hdd1 produced error messages and nextcloud left itself in maintenance mode. Fortunately, I found the following hint on here:
sudo -u www-data php /var/www/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode --off
and that apparently got nextcloud working normally again.
I felt more than a little uneasy at the thought that the Rpi3 system (which has 50GB of data loaded) might have been corrupted by the failed backup and so I will play some more with nc-backup on the Rp4 system before having another go on the Rpi3.