Option for External Storage Only

In some instances I would find it useful to only permit external storage, and/or have it mounted at the “root” of a user’s home directory (this would be especially useful when using a sync client.) Are there any plans to implement this?

I’ve opened an issue for that just some days ago :wink: … it was part of the ownCloud Enterprise Edition :grin:

Thanks @mar1u5! If I recall correctly, external storage was only for the enterprise in OC, but it still wasn’t possible to set an external storage mount at the ‘root’ of a users profile (which is my main question). Unless I’m misunderstanding @MorrisJobke’s comment on the thread you referenced, the workaround suggested would need to be applied on a per-user basis. The primary reason I’d like the option to set external storage at the root of a user profile is so that users within a group all have access to the exact same mount point (like a quasi shared fileserver.) Or perhaps is there another way to implement this that I’m missing entirely?

In the big picture I’d like to be able to assign granular permissions, but this it off topic.

Nope. External Storage was possible for everybody. But you were not able to set external storage as primary (or “only”) storage :wink:

Nope. External Storage was possible for everybody. But you were not able to set external storage as primary (or “only”) storage :wink:

Well well well, thanks to my brain!

So how do we then set external storage as primary in NC in the GUI, or is that what you were writing about in the other thread? Seems like the config-based-line solution that @MorrisJobke suggested was the only way (unless I’m misunderstanding again haha)

It is not possible currently :wink: Thats what your Post and my issue on GitHub is about :monkey_face: … Am I wrong?

No. This is correct. Using one external storage for all users is not possible. The only primary storage support that is currently available is the object store, but there all users have their own storage. It’s not shared. And it is also not on the roadmap to have a single mount point available for all users as root. This would then be the same as a single login (from a files perspective).

Me too. Would love to see S3 available as root level storage. That feature alone will make me switch from owncloud.

Hello everybody, somebody know how to set Google Drive as primary storage? I read on the manual that you could use Multibucket Object Store but Im not sure what it means. Thnx

First of all - nextcloud evolved to a wonderful product and we are happy using it for some months now, building many workflows around it.

I just wonder if here was some misunderstanding here about the wish of having external-files as root folder.

To have an external storage as the root folder (and not being forced to mount it as a subdirectory) does not necessarily mean to have a “shared” folder there.

We have a similar problem (1000+ user). Our users have already a samba home directory on a fileserver. Nextcloud is running smoothly on another server.

Allowing every user to have his Samba-Home in a subdirectory is great. And everything (sharing, etc.) is working perfectly.

But there is the “space” in the nextcloud-root. It is accessible ONLY via nextcloud (or webdav), but not via the Samba-Home.

If now the Samba-Home were the users root folder in nextcloud, the files in Samba and Nextcloud would be identically from the users perspective.

We can set the quota to (near) 0 - but this is mostly confusing to the user (and the lazy ones just omit the Samba-Home-Directory and quickly save within nextcloud.

A checkbox (“use this as nextcloud root”) within external files would really be a nice option. It also inherits the opportunity to host ALL user files on a different host than the one of the nextcloud installation.

Sincerely,
Thomas

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This is exact what we need, too!

We also have a CIFS fileserver where every User has it’s home and we wan’t to deny the users to create directories or files on the local storage of the nextcloud.

So it would be nice to lock the user into the external storage or to make the nextcloud local directory read only.

Thanks,
Lars

I haven’t tried this, but I think you can share an external storage with a guest user, and then that would be the only folder they can access.