Ppa-desktop-client deleted all files // flatpak safe?

📱 Desktop & mobile clients
1

Hello,

I had a very weird behavior with Nextcloud desktop client 2.6.5 (via ppa) on Linux Mint 19.3, Nextcloud server 20.0.14

All of a sudden the whole day the client struggled with two files, errors:

  • “Fehler beim Schreiben der Metadaten in die Datenbank” (failure to write metadata into database) and the other"
  • “Verbindung beendet” (connection terminated)

Those files were not new, they were in those folders for months already. The client kept erasing the whole folder that contained the files and downloading everything again (took hours each time). Then, all of a sudden, all files that were in that cloud account were deleted. I paused synchronisation, checked web interface: all files gone!!
Activity view said that all files were deleted by the user that I am talking about.
Looking into trash: I could restore some folders. But some folders were deleted by said user, but did not appear in the trash, so I could not restore them from thrash.

So I used my backups to restore the folders.

Very weird behavior. Any thoughts?

Appimage? Flatpak?
I decided to use the appimage from now on, which people tell me is the only official version of the sync client. I was reluctant to use the appimage before for security reasons and for “that’s not how you do it in linux”-reasons. Also, I fear that the latest version of the client might not be as stable as it should be (mind you there is no LTS release for the client!!), so I sticked with the 2.X.X series. Also, I find the 3.X.X series very user unfriendly, the really important stuff (e.g. error messages) is hidden behind three clicks, when in 2.x.x it was one click.

I see there are two different flatpak versions, com.nextcloud.desktopclient.nextcloud and org.nextcloud.Nextcloud — I would prefer flatpak over appimage. Is the flatpak safe to use? If yes which one? And can someone do something about the confusing two versions on flathub? And can someone delete the ppa if it’s not safe to use?

2

take a look at this BR

the problem is related to VFS but the underlying problem sounds very similar and I bet the problem is the same with 2.x clients: if the client fails to replicate files (but doesn’t remember this) at some point it decides to remove this files from the server…

3

Thank you! In my case, vfs was not activated. Still, what you say could have been the case. I don’t really want to put energy into finding out what happened, I’d rather be safe from now on.

I am still not sure if the flatpak is ok to use, and which of the flatpak versions I should use (com.nextcloud.desktopclient.nextcloud or org.nextcloud.Nextcloud).

Or if I really should use the appimage – not even sure how you do it if you have multiple users? Do I put the appimage somewhere outside of the home directories!?

4

Perhaps you can also use

add-apt-repository ppa:nextcloud-devs/client
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install nextcloud-client (nextcloud-desktop)

I think the official package for all linux users is the Appimage.
Flatpak and Snap are a little bit the windows way :wink:

Years ago nobody needed the newest version of software and the distributor e.g. Debian patched the software and build the packages.