Very presistent Internal Server Error

love when you just keep being logic about things and in the end you actualy solve the problem.

So first, i did some more investigations about the fact, that i get this ** internatl server error but then my error log does not show me any errors… - ppl in the internet were saying this can be caused by broken php scripts and or php modules - so i checked over all my modules again updated, checked them and set them up right version. - didnt help.

i also set up another instance of nextcloud to see if the server is actually broken.
as this was working perfectly fine (and much faster than my actual instance) i came back to

i think - the only things i didnt’ replace by now is
the data directory
the database
the config file

so i
Went into my config.php and started to Mess up things
when i broke the path to the data directory - i suddenly got a proper answer from the webui. (it loaded!!) and told me wrong directory. i could even log in and everything worked when i made a new valid data directory. (apart from there was no data of course)
So then i thought it must be the data directory then

i checked all permissions (again) and had a lok at what was there. (still files from the owncloud age for example) and started deleting stuff until i got a response from the webui.

in the end it was the appdata_instanceid folder. i tried quiet a while to reconstruct that first from my new nextcloud instance and then from my backups (since i have plenty of them) - but nothing acutally worked fully… ( kinda bad sign)

then i learned about that What is the appdata_ocpom4nckwru directory? - #9 by Andymoene and that Screwed up data/appdata_instanceid - #3 by immersenetworks. and that finally got my instance up and runnung.

only 2 months of webui downtime…

So in the end and after ~20+ hours of troubleshooting i think here is what happened (also based on what i saw in the backup iterations):

I started the Update (to latest 16) in the webui and that destroyed my appdata folder. (actually there was only the preview folder left in it) - then neither the commandline updater nor the nextcloud fix/repair commands fixed that. - very bad

So i highly recommend to change stuff that this cannot happen. - eighter the appdata folder should get checked/fixed by the repair commands or it should not be able to cause such a severe problem aka should give out an appropriate error in webui…

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