I have no support/technical question and have seen the support category. (Be aware that direct support questions will be deleted.)
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Which general topic do you have
I don’t really know where to post this doubt, so forgive me if it’s not the most suitable place. I have searched existing questions and HowTos but haven’t seen this particular problem mentioned.
I work at a small regional office and headquarters is requiring us to use Sharepoint. However Microsoft is ending support for Sharepoint on-premises next July. I haven’t yet installed NextCloud but I was considering it because Internet access speed required for Sharepoint online exceeds our link capacity and we can’t increase it for reasons a little complex to explain, but I noticed there was a Sharepoint storage backend available.
So my question is: could I use NextCloud to work locally at our regional office in the normal way and use the Sharepoint storage backend just for synchronizing automatically to headquarters during the weekend when nobody is using the link?
Hello @geekmidget, welcome to the Nextcloud community!
This forum is run by volunteers mostly targeting private/SoHO users.. your question is completely out of scope and against our goals.. but I give you a starting point for your journey.
It depends on your general mind - if there is some organisation policy which requires Sharepoint/M365 - then you organisation must provide with sufficient bandwidth to use cloud services. btw Sharepoint is much more than “dumb storage” - if you organisation relies on SP likely there is more functionality to consider. this is also relevant to your second question - if you simply misuse SP as a storage you might be able to access it as “external storage” - but there is no “scheduled sync” for such integration.. btw - I doubt you really need much bandwidth for daily usage (once initial sync is done)
If you plan to use Nextcloud - feel free to start and come back if you have any questions.
Unfortunately your information is pretty vague. You do not tell any details about the relevant features of Sharepoint that you are using (or better - must haves, should haves, could haves).
Further you do not tell anything about your available bandwith nor about the number of users involved nor approximate amount of documents/data. So it is difficult to say whether Nextcloud could fit your needs.
I am using the Nextcloud on a Raspberry 4 with 8 GB RAM - or better I use 2 raspberries at 2 different locations where the main one syncs to the second spare one during the night via rsync. That unfortunately only works for file based data. So only Nextcloud Apps that store their data in files (and not in other database tables) will have the data replicated to the other instance. We are 5 users and the second instance is only the spare one for the case the main one fails. There is no hot swap here. By the time I set that up, the 2-way-sync was beta only and I do not know how the current state is. It would be cool if I could find a way to replicate table data too and would have the option of an automated switch in case of failure, but that would imply DNS record updates of course. This is maybe something in the future. Would be interesting to hear, how others are solving the requirement of availability. That IMHO, may be a tipping point here, as with MS 365 nobody needs to think about the availability and fail-over strategy.
We have about 25 PCs in our regional office accesing Internet through a link with a capacity of just 16 Mbps download and 11 Mbps upload, and the organization can’t really provide more bandwidth right now because budget would have to be increased by ten times at the very least (plus there are other obstacles). Headquarters is using Sharepoint mostly as a storage / versioning control system so I though about this approach of NextCloud with Sharepoint storage as a backend but it can’t be an always-online backend. Our link would simply collapse.
I just wanted to know if I could achieve such synchronization plan as I had in mind with NextCloud before installing it and bumping with the obstacle that it’s technically impossible.
Edit: from the hardware point of view, server is a Dell PowerEdge with enough CPU, RAM and storage. LAN is at 1 Gbps. The critical limiting factor is again Internet link capacity.
In terms of Nextcloud - it is not designed to perform background sync of the server data. As an admin you definitely could perform replication/backup in some remote location but I doubt your HQ will accept such concept.. but this is well a topic to clarify inside your company.
I had zero interest in discussing budget, but I was suggested that institution should increase link and I was merely trying to explain why that wasn’t really an option. Your reply suggests that the Sharepoint backend doesn’t support scheduled synchronization, but you haven’t really clarified it and instead have been questioning organization details. Not very helpful really, since my question was clear enough.
Two servers replicating data are not ideal in my eyes - I would recommend you review 101: backup what and why (not how). In my eyes most requirements are better solved by solid backup rather than HA. we had some discussions about high-availability here likely you find interesting insight there.
this is not true. MS is definitely doing a lot to keep your data available but this doesn’t help if entire service fails or some crazy person applies sanctions on your country or your business. But yes this topic far beyond of threat model and capability of most people.
I’m sorry, you are coming here and ask for free support to solve your business problem. I gave you many hints which you decided to ignore and keep asking for solution for you really edge case. Please think a second about your expectations for free support and open source software.
I am not actually asking for technical support but merely asking if the Sharepoint backend has a functionality. I never said we could not pay for support to NextCloud but simply there is no point in installing Nextcloud to begin with if technically it can’t do what we need. So it’s different.
