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The Basics
Nextcloud Server version (e.g., 29.x.x):
33.05
Operating system and version (e.g., Ubuntu 24.04):
Ubuntu 24.04
Web server and version (e.g, Apache 2.4.25):
Not changed from Snap default
Reverse proxy and version _(e.g. nginx 1.27.2)
Not changed from Snap default
PHP version (e.g, 8.3):
Not changed from Snap default
Is this the first time you’ve seen this error? (Yes / No):
Not an error, this is a help request
Installation method (e.g. AlO, NCP, Bare Metal/Archive, etc.)
Snap
Are you using CloudfIare, mod_security, or similar? (Yes / No)
No
Summary of the issue you are facing:
I have a new install of Nextcloud Snap, and I’d like to move the Collectives data folder from another instance to this one.
Collectives provides a UI for changing the data folder, but it doesn’t work as expected. When I select the desired folder, it renames it (appended with “1”), and then creates a new, empty folder at the location I’d chosen.
Alternatively, I’d also tried dragging the files from the old folder to the assigned Collectives data folder, but get the mystifying error “No files to process”, which I suspect is actually a permissions error.
What is the best method for moving Collectives data from one instance to another?
Thank you, but that was the feature I was referring to when I wrote:
"“Collectives provides a UI for changing the data folder, but it doesn’t work as expected. When I select the desired folder, it renames it (appended with “1”), and then creates a new, empty folder at the location I’d chosen.”
Is there a way to make it accept an existing folder and its contents?
Thank you. I can create new Collectives just fine, but I’m hoping to find a way to bring in the .md Collectives files I’ve backed up from another instance.
I’m unable to move or copy them to the folder Collectives uses, and when I try to change Collectives’ Setting to use my desired folder of existing .md files it instead creates a new one with that name, and renames my desired older by adding “(1)”, and never uses those files.
Collectives are managed by the collectives app and their data on the server side of things is stored in the appdata folder. The collectives app then mounts this folder into the configured collectives folders of all members. That’s why you cannot simply write to that folder to transfer a collective.
What you need to do instead is create a new collective and then copy the content into this collective.
There are different ways to copy over the data:
As an admin using occ commands on the command line
occ collectives:import:markdown /tmp/oldCollective -c 123 -u bob -p 0
The options are:
the directory where your old collective is stored
-c The id of the collective you want to import into (Number at the end of the url of the collective)
-u User to import the pages as
-p Page to use as the parent page of all pages (0 for root).
All of those are required.
As a user using the web interface
You can also visit the collective folder in the files app and upload the files in question to the folder.
As a user using the sync client
You can also sync the collectives folder to your local computer and copy the files over there.
Curious. After discovering I can’t move files from other folders into the Collectives folder, it never occurred to me that I could first download them and then upload them into the Collectives folder.
A bit tedious to create each of the Collectives as I went, but it went swimmingly.
To my understanding you should be able to move files into the new collective. It’s just that you cannot put anything into the collectives folder itself - only into individual collectives.
