Moving to the new Cloud

So following the implosion of our Nextcloud server on Monday, we've had to move to a new one.

Unfortunately I could not do a clean migration as the old server was not fully accessible, which means:

• Your user account needs to be recreated.
• You need to re-download the files.

You can of course decide not to reconnect the sync, the files you currently have won't go anywhere. But if you want to continue syncing with the latest assets, then you'll need to go ahead and keep reading.

Firstly, you'll need to remove the connection to the old server by clicking on the tray icon and removing the account:

After that, I recommend you delete the folder you were previously syncing to. You could try syncing over that folder with the new cloud, but I don't know if this would work. If you try this, let me know how it goes, but I would not recommend it.

Nextcloud will then pop up the starting window, asking you to Log in again. If not, you can always add a new account by clicking on the tray icon like before.

This time, use "https://nx19190.your-storageshare.de" as the server address.

You will need a new login for this server. Your old one will not work.

To get an account created for you, follow the first part of these instructions (log in to polyhaven.com with your Patreon account, and send an invite to your email address).

Then it's the same story as before:

Select a local folder you want to sync to, then select your syncing method, either "Virtual files" (recommended) or "Choose what to sync":

• "Virtual files" have the advantage of taking the least space and bandwidth while still making all the files available to use, but the disadvantage of requiring you to be online to use any files you haven't used before (and adding a small delay for downloading them when you use them the first time). However if you know you'll need certain files to be available offline, you can still tell a folder/file to be permanently available.
• If you select "Choose what to sync", remember to only select the folders you plan to use to avoid downloading terabytes of data unnecessarily. Our new server has a relatively small monthly bandwidth limit, so I would not recommend this method unless your OS does not support virtual files.

If you do not see the "Use virtual files" option, check both Windows and the Nextcloud app are up to date.

A postmortem of the old server

The exact cause of the melt down is uncertain, but the logs that I could still access seemed to indicate a malfunctioning hard drive.

This resulted in a kind of chain of events, corrupting the database and possibly triggering some firewall rules that locked me out of the server entirely.

Usually when this kind of thing happens in the modern world, you just grab your backups and hop over to a fresh server.

Unfortunately, for reasons that are entirely my fault, our backups were only running for the stored files themselves, and not the Nextcloud configuration and database.

So a clean migration to a new server was not possible, and we have to start afresh.

Going forward, obviously I want to avoid something like this happening again.

This is why I've switched over to a managed service, who will take over maintenance and security of the server. Everything is running on a redundant RAID array, and the host assures me that should anything go wrong it should be trivial to swap over to a new machine without losing any configurations or data.

The downside of this option is that we now have a much smaller monthly bandwidth limit, and no way of purchasing more traffic. This may be an issue in the near future, we shall see.

In any case, thanks for your patience, and I'm sorry for all this unnecessary hassle of setting up your folder sync again :(