From Owncloud to Nextcloud

I had been using Owncloud for nearly ten years, and was quite satisfied.

So naturally, when a friend needed a similar solution, my first step was to set up Owncloud for him. You use the tools that you know best.

After the installation and before he even started using it, I got a feeling creeping up that I had better check the differences between Owncloud and Nextcloud. And so I did. And then I decided that Nextcloud was the better solution. I spare you the comparison, you can do a web search yourself; suffice it to say that many of the differences were quite appealing to me, last but not least the fact that it is completely open source and has a very active community.

I had already invested time into setting up users, groups and permissions, so I thought, the best was was to run the upgrade script that Nextcloud provide to migrate from Owncloud. I reckoned, it would be quite fast, as there was no content yet. Well, tough s**t: it upgraded from Owncloud 10 to Nextcloud 12, the last compatible version. OK, then you would have to upgrade Nextcloud step by step until you reach version 18 - seems like a very long way. Maybe I would have gone down that path, but I could not even run Nextcloud 12, because it requires PHP 7.1 or lower, a packe not supported any longer and thus (and this is a good thing) not available on the server.

So, back to square one, a clean installation of Nextcloud 18, and creating all the stuff again. It was a bit tiresome, but well worth it. Even during the installation process I was impressed with the quality of the checks, security considerations and advice they offered.

Now this was done, I was able to get my own take on the differences. It was like buying a new bike after 15 years: you were quite satisfied with the old one, but one you had a taste of the new one, there was no going back :-)

So now I needed to migrate my own Owncloud instance, which contained a lot of data. After my experience describe above, I went for a clean install again.

Users, groups, permissions etc. were set up rather quickly.

Migrating the data took a long time, but it was mostly waiting for the computer: I decided to copy the data directory, so I had a backup just in case; moving it obviously had saved several hours.

After copying (or moving) the data directory, running occ files:scan took another couple of hours. This is required so Nextcloud knows about the files I had slipped there behind its back.

Finally, address books an calendars are easy to migrate via export and import. Boring manual work, but I had my reward already in sight :-)

I then put Owncloud into maintenance mode, updated all clients, and switched it off completely. Of course, if you just re-use
Now I am happy and smiling with my new bike Nextcloud instance!

I still have not explored all the new options and apps, there is a lot to explore. This will keep me busy for a while ...