Setting up NextCloud on My Raspberry Pi

Over the last week or two, I set up our raspberry pi to work as a Nextcloud server. I wanted an easy way to back up photos from my phone.

I read through and followed lots of guides to get it working.

• https://opensource.com/article/18/7/network-attached-storage-Raspberry-Pi
• https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-exfat/
• https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/external-storage.md
• http://baddotrobot.com/blog/2017/10/26/upgrade-raspian-jessie-to-stretch/
• https://pimylifeup.com/upgrade-raspbian-stretch-to-raspbian-buster/
• https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-nextcloud-server/
• http://unixetc.co.uk/2016/11/20/simple-nextcloud-installation-on-raspberry-pi/

Now that it’s up and working, I can say that it alls works pretty well without too much trouble. With some time and perserverence, I’m sure you can set it up as well. But as a reminder to myself, I wanted to notes some things that tripped me or slowed me down. No matter how trivial the project, we should all remember, these things take some time.

Even before I really got started at all, I found out that my Raspberry Pi operating system was a bit behind. So, I spent a bit of time upgrading. First, I had to upgrade from “Jessie” to “Stretch”. Then, I upgraded from “Stretch” to “Buster”. This was completely straightforward, but it took a while (hours?) to complete. It probably went quicker than that, but it was so long that I stepped away and just periodically checked on it. I think this sort of “rot” happens on any project. You go to fix one thing, but you discover you have to do a lot of other clean up before you can even get started.

The next big time consuming thing was permissions. In Unix, every file and folder associated permissions. Who owns a file? Who can read, write or run a file? Setting tight permissions prevents bad-guys from messing with your stuff and keeps you from shooting yourself in the foot. But it can also be a pain. You “workaround” this problem by just relaxing all restrictions and making every file readable and writeable by everyone in the world. It’s simpler to get things done when there is no security. In contrast, doing the right thing takes longer, and the benefits are often unsatisfyingly delayed, but it’s usually worth it, right? So, I fiddled around until permissions and user ownership were just enough to get things working, and not any more than necessary.

Finally, the last big time suck was figuring out how to adjust the power settings on my hard drive. I expect the NextCloud server to sporadically need to read and write to the my hard drive. It would be a couple of times per day max, and many days, no reading or writing would be needed. So, I wanted my hard drive to spin down to save on wear and tear. A lot of suggestions on using one tool or another sounded like they would work, if your hard drive was compatible. In the end, I got to a happy solution, but it took a decent amount of trial and error.

Conclusion

I’m glad that I completed this project and that I’m putting my raspberry pi to good use. It didn’t take too much to set up the Nextcloud server, but yet, it took longer than I expected. I’ll try to remember this whenever I estimate work. If I don’t know exactly what I’m doing, it’ll probably take a little longer than I’d guess.