My owncloud install was about 4 months old. Now my server failed to reboot after some Ubuntu updates, and can't be fixed... I will do a fresh Ubuntu install. So I have OwnCloud backup, but it might be out of time.
I had a cron job that ran that morning and backed up the databases and the entire WWW directory. The OC user files live on an external drive, that should be fine...
My concern is about the files that changed the day of the death. The external drive obviously has the changes because they were made in real time. But the database backup is 10 hours older, and I was modifying files that day. What will happen? Does owncloud rely solely on information in the database, and will this totally make things worse when I attempt to restore it?
So you backed up the database but not the data? If the disk is still accessible, what about using a live CD to get an up-to-date version of the database?
I backup the data too, but the combination I described is the most 'in sync' and recent. So back to how owncloud thinks. What happens if the database and data are out of sync? Can you guys give some examples of bugs I would experience in the situation I described?
A full backup is the data and the database (taken at the same time), so what you're talking about is not officially supported. See:
https://doc.owncloud.org/server/latest/admin_manual/maintenance/backup.html
If you had a complete backup, then you could restore the backup, and re-upload the latest versions of the files, which are present on the clients. See: