One of my bigger frustrations with Owncloud was that updates were handled so poorly. Sometimes they’d take weeks to show up in the updater, and sometimes they’d simply never show. A manual update is straightforward enough, but backing up the entire installation takes a couple of hours, and I’d really rather not have my service down for that long every time I need to update the OC install.
So along comes Nextcloud, and a big part of the “sell” is that updating will be sweetness and light. Off I go and install NC 9.0.51 over my OC installation. Everything works fine. But then I see that 9.0.53’s been released, and my updater is silent–it says I’m on the current version. Now I see that 10.0.0 is out, and my updater still says that my 9.0.51 install is the current version.
Has anything really happened to improve the upgrade process, or am I stuck with the same old manual process as before?
This has been discussed nearly 25 times in the past two months. Please search the forum for updater and script and you may find some info, especially in this thread.
You can’t expect them to have it ready straight away - it’s already been said that it’ll be part of Nextcloud 11. In the meantime a manual upgrade takes about 5 minutes - hardly the end of the world.
Either you have much less data than I do, your machine’s much faster than mine, or your upgrade method is very different. My upgrade method (straight out of the owncloud docs) involves using rsync to back up the entire installation, including the data folder. Size is about 60 GB, with about 35k files. On my system, that runs for a couple of hours. And, of course, OC/NC has to be in maintenance mode or the backup won’t be consistent, so the service is down while that happens.
And yes, I think I can reasonably expect them to have it ready straight away. There was already an updater in OC, and it worked adequately once someone made the new release available on the update server–which is what always seemed to be the sticking point. Ease and consistency of updates were major points raised by the NC folks in announcing the NC split. But now it’s apparently the case that it’s going to take two major releases to restore a feature that was in OC 6?
But the old updater didn’t back up your data directory only your configuration, base install and apps? Now I don’t backup my data directory (3tb) at the time of upgrade only database - worst case I have hourly btrfs snapshotting in place.
All I do is:
Put Nextcloud in maintenance mode.
Move /data and /config out of web root.
3 Delete the web root
Download latest version into parent folder.
Extract it
Rename extracted directory to that defined as your web root.
chown -R webserveruser:primary group webroot
Move data and config directories into web root
Run occ update command
Turn maintenance mode off
I do actually do offsite backup but that’s a separate monthly thing.
Not really an instance with around 60 users, over 3tb data and a MySQL database exceeding 400m.
Moving data around on the storage array is instantaneous obviously, the MySQL database is on two SSDs in BTRFS RAID 1.
The only thing that should take any amount of time is upgrading the database schema - my database is fairly big but it’s doesn’t really take that much time at all and I haven’t built my server around stupendously powerful hardware it’s just a fairly dated avaton soc with 16gb ram.
But that’s kind of besides the point, point is beyond the initial gain of a couple of minutes the built in updater isn’t going to save a heck of a lot of time. The online updater only benefits by you not having to log into the shell and execute the commands yourself, nothing else - it’s slightly more convenient and obviously highly important for less experienced users; that’s it!
It would probably greatly speed my upgrades (and reduce the size of my backup files) if I kept my data directory outside my nextcloud tree, but I’m not doing that at this point. In any event, thanks for the info. Updating to 9.0.53 went smoothly, and I’ll probably make the jump to 10 shortly.