I initially stored my ownCloud data on an external NTFS hard disk. (Yes, this was not a good idea at all.) After some time now I wanted to move the files to a bigger ext4 drive on the same machine. Unluckily there are many posts and articles that are really irritating on the Internet, such as: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. At least I found some promising hints at the official GitHub forums (this and that) and gave it a try:

At many points, someone noted that it is not officially supported to move the data directory after installation. :( However, the just linked GitHub pages are talking about a method. I tried to copy (cp) all of my files, but ran into some hard disk errors due to broken USB connections on my server. After I tried it again (cp -u), I finally used rsync to copy all of my files, incl. the hidden files that were not copied with cp. These were my steps:

Copy

I first enabled the maintenance mode:

and began to copy my data files (500 GB) from one mount to another. (NOTE: You should skip these steps and use rsync directly, such as explained in a few seconds):

But since I ran into some hard disk errors, I used cp again with the -u option to “update” all files:

After that I set the correct file ownership to www-data:

While I was still confused whether all files were copied, I noticed that at least the hidden files such as .htaccess were NOT present at the new file location. A colleague gave me the hint to use rsync, which I tried thereafter. (Refer to here and there.) I first ran the demo mode from rsync. Additionally I set the -P option for progress information and the –stats for final statistics. Also note the critical slashes at both paths. While the first one ends with a slash, the second doesn’t:

(Since I copied from an NTFS hard disk, I also used the –size-only option to compare only the sizes of the files and not the ownership.)

Finally, I ran the following command to copy all broken files which were not copied correctly during my cp runs:

Yep, it worked. Great so far.

And ownCloud Changes

Now I changed the “datadirectory” path within the config.php file:

to point to the new mounted drive:

And I ran the repair command that was mentioned in the GitHub post:

This looked like the following (and executed quite fast!):

Yeah, after some breathing space I disabled the maintenance mode:

And I was REALLY HAPPY that everything worked again. YEAH! (Though I am still a bit nervous because of this post which talks about some absolute paths within logrotate. I have never used this or heard about it concerning ownCloud. Hopefully, this won’t break my data after a few weeks…)

Featured image “IMG_4696” by Holly Marquardt is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.