Restored system so nextcloud server was older, clients lost newer data

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Nextcloud version (eg, 20.0.5): 21.0.5
Operating system and version (eg, Ubuntu 20.04): Debian 9
Apache or nginx version (eg, Apache 2.4.25): Apache 2.4.25
PHP version (eg, 7.4): 7.4.9

The issue you are facing:
I use clonezilla to image my server drive periodically, about every 2-3 weeks. I had a crisis with my email server, which necessitated a system restore. However, this had the effect of causing my server/client syncing to get out of whack. All newer files on NC clients were deleted with when the system was restored. Where are these files? How can I recover them?

Is this the first time you’ve seen this error? (Y/N): Yes

Steps to replicate it: Disaster situation (not related to NC), have to restore system (NC also shares), and for the time frame between the last restore, client syncs delete more recent files.

  1. Use Clonezilla to image drive
  2. Use NC like normal for a week
  3. Restore the image from the previous week
  4. new client syncs will delete newer files.

The output of your Nextcloud log in Admin > Logging:

Only contains data prior to the image being created.

The output of your config.php file in /path/to/nextcloud (make sure you remove any identifiable information!):

Nothing altered here or revealing

The output of your Apache/nginx/system log in /var/log/____:

No references to NC

EDIT: Not solved yet, but I think the only option is advanced data recovery software, that should recover it, if it was on a client computer nextcloud folder as a form of data. I think that should work.

In general I would say this is expected behavior. In a client/server architecture I would expect the server is always authoritative over the data, so recovering server to older stat also resets the client to this state… unfortunately this often not the case with NC clients.

there are tools like testdisk and photorec guide, other guide available you can try to recover you lost documents (works good from my experience)… definitely you must stop using the system and only access the disk in read-only mode if you plan to recover file from the disk (professional or on your own) - modern operation system keep writing on the disk all the time even if you don’t change data and this could overwrite data pieces of your documents remaining on the disk.

Thanks for the reply.

In the end, not a major deal. Fortunately, I had made a copy ten days ago, to revert to. My nextcloud instance got out of whack, but it’s good.

I had experiences in the past (with owncloud), where there were duplicates and all kinds of problems, probably something similar happened, and back then, these issues were handled differently? Perhaps, who knows.

I wasn’t able to recover things on clients, primarily because they all use macs, and apple’s newest technology is not easily recoverable (for safety reasons).

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