Using External Storage as Primary Storage for NextCloud
February 24, 2021
While setting up my self-hosted NextCloud instance on a Raspberry Pi, I wasn’t able to find instructions on how to use external storage as my primary storage for it. This post will try to explain the steps that I had to go through in order be able to do just that. The main things it required were: a linux-compatible file system with proper permissions, and being able to mount the external drive automatically.
The first thing you need to do is ensure that it uses a linux compatible file system. That is a requirement because the folder needs to be given permissions to read and write as www-data user. Using the ext4 filesystem on the external drive will help fulfill that requirement.
Repartition and format your external drive
First, plug in your hard drive. To find the name of your device, you can use the lsblk command to get that information. In this example, I will be using /dev/sda as the name of the device. If the external drive will only be used as your primary NextCloud storage, you can partition your disk to have only one ext4 partition that will use all the available space. In the case that you will sometimes use it with other operating systems, I would recommend creating a second partition with a filesystem that is more compatible other operating systems, such as exFAT or ntfs.
Warning: Make sure you don’t have any existing data on the drive before repartitioning your disk, all the data will be wiped after completing these steps.
Using parted, set the partitioning standard to GPT and created the partition that will use 100% of the available storage space:
sudo parted /dev/sda mklabel gpt
sudo parted -a opt /dev/sda mkpart primary ext4 0% 100%
-a optsets the alignment-type as optimal
After creating those partitions, format the partition with a filesystem.
sudo mkfs.ext4 -L new-volume-label /dev/sda1
-L new-volume-labelsets the volume label
Mounting your external storage
Once you have the partitions ready to go, you have to ensure that the drive is permanently mounted on your Pi. Create a directory under /mnt/ and mount the partition that you’ll be using as main storage for your NextCloud instance.
sudo mkdir /mnt/myexternalstorage
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/myexternaldrive
In order to mount it permanently, find the UUID of the device’s partition you’ll be using.
lsblk --fs
--fssets it to output info about filesystems
With that UUID, add this line to the fstab file (found under /etc/fstab) to automate the process to mount partitions.
UUID=YOUR_UUID_HERE /mnt/myexternaldrive ext4 defaults,auto,users,rw,nofail 0 0
replace
YOUR_UUID_HEREwith the one you found
Setting it as your main Nextcloud storage
Create the directory that will host your primary NextCloud data folder. You can simply create a directory called nextcloud-data. Give that directory full ownership to the www-data user and ensure that nextcloud-data directory has proper permissions.
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /mnt/myexternaldrive/nextcloud-data/
sudo chmod 750 /mnt/myexternaldrive/nextcloud-data/
-Ris used to operate on files and directories recursively
750give the ownerread, write, and executepermissions, the groupread and executepermissions and others no (0) permissions.
During the initial NextCloud setup, you’ll be asked to provide the directory you’ll want use as your data directory. Enter your external storage’s folder /mnt/myexternaldrive/nextcloud-data. You are now using your external storage as the main storage for your NextCloud instance. :)
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