Migrating to new server

qqlaw · July 8, 2017, 4:23pm

Hello everyone,

I accidentally hit "sudo chown www-data:www-data /" on my ubuntu server and now i need to setup a new server.

My owncloud data server is saved in another separate partition /cloud. And i was wondering, since I am running my owncloud on esxi, can i just move that .vmdk file (or the /cloud partition) from the old server to the new server?

I will manually recreate all my users in the owncloud database.

OR: should i setup a new server, do not copy that partition, leave all the users home dirs empty and let the users sync their files from their desktops to the server. But how do i know that it wont delete their files from their desktops?

Would this work? or will this mess things up? what is the right approach to do this?
Most importantly i am really afraid if my users lose any files from their desktops.

Thank you

tflidd · July 22, 2017, 8:34pm

If it is an extra partition, you can just continue to use it. For restored data, there is a setting for the config file to handle the clients correctly (only for full restores including the database):

github.com

owncloud/core/blob/master/config/config.sample.php#L1345-L1356


/**
* Sets the data-fingerprint of the current data served
*
* This is a property used by the clients to find out if a backup has been
* restored on the server. Once a backup is restored run
* ./occ maintenance:data-fingerprint
* To set this to a new value.
*
* Updating/Deleting this value can make connected clients stall until
* the user has resolved conflicts.
*/
'data-fingerprint' => '',

Make backups of all data, and for your users, I'd recommend it as well in case with restoring not everything works out as planned.