Backup

To backup an Nextcloud installation there are four main things you need to retain:

  1. The config folder
  2. The data folder
  3. The theme folder
  4. The database

Maintenance mode

maintenance:mode locks the sessions of logged-in users and prevents new logins in order to prevent inconsistencies of your data. You must run occ as the HTTP user, like this example on Ubuntu Linux:

$ sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:mode --on

You may also put your server into this mode by editing config/config.php. Change "maintenance" => false to "maintenance" => true:

<?php

 "maintenance" => true,

Don’t forget to change it back to false when you are finished.

Backup folders

Simply copy your config, data and theme folders (or even your whole Nextcloud install and data folder) to a place outside of your Nextcloud environment. You could use this command:

rsync -avx nextcloud/ nextcloud-dirbkp_`date +"%Y%m%d"`/

Backup database

Warning

Before restoring a backup see Restoring backup

MySQL/MariaDB

MySQL or MariaDB, which is a drop-in MySQL replacement, is the recommended database engine. To backup MySQL/MariaDB:

mysqldump --single-transaction -h [server] -u [username] -p[password] [db_name] > nextcloud-sqlbkp_`date +"%Y%m%d"`.bak

SQLite

sqlite3 data/owncloud.db .dump > nextcloud-sqlbkp_`date +"%Y%m%d"`.bak

PostgreSQL

PGPASSWORD="password" pg_dump [db_name] -h [server] -U [username] -f nextcloud-sqlbkp_`date +"%Y%m%d"`.bak