Migrating from Owncloud 7 on Debian to Nextcloud 11

These days I got a mail by my hosting provider stating that my Owncloud instance is unsecure, because the online scan from scan.nextcloud.com mailed them. However the scan seemed quite bogus: it reported some issues that were listed as already solved in Debians changelog file. But unfortunately the last entry in changelog was on January 5th, 2016. So, there has been more than a whole year without security updates for Owncloud in Debian stable.

In an discussion with the Nextcloud team I complained a little bit that the scan/check is not appropriate. The Nextcloud team replied very helpful with additional information, such as two bug reports in Debian to clarify that the Owncloud package will most likely be removed in the next release: #816376 and #822681.

So, as there is no nextcloud package in Debian unstable as of now, there was no other way to manually upgrade & migrate to Nextcloud. This went fairly well:

ownCloud 7 -> ownCloud 8.0 -> ownCloud 8.1 -> ownCloud 8.2 -> ownCloud 9.0 -> ownCloud 9.1 -> Nextcloud 10 -> Nextcloud 11

There were some smaller caveats:

  1. When migrating from OC 9.0 to OC 9.1 you need to migrate your addressbooks and calendars as described in the OC 9.0 Release Notes
  2. When migrating from OC 9.1 to Nextcloud 10, the OC 9.1 is higher than expected by the Mextcloud upgrade script, so it warns about that you can’t downgrade your installation. The fix was simply to change the OC version in the config.php
  3. The Documents App of OC 7 is no longer available in Nextcloud 11 and is replaced by Collabora App, which is way more complex to setup

The installation and setup of the Docker image for collabora/code was the main issue, because I wanted to be able to edit documents in my cloud. For some reason Nextcloud couldn’t connect to my docker installation. After some web searches I found “Can’t connect to Collabora Online” which led me to the next entry in the Nextcloud support forum. But in the end it was this posting that finally made it work for me. So, in short I needed to add…

DOCKER_OPTS=”–storage-driver=devicemapper”

to /etc/default/docker.

So, in the end everything worked out well and my cloud instance is secure again. 🙂

UPDATE 2016-02-18 10:52:
Sadly with that working Collabora Online container from Docker I now face this issue of zombie processes for loolforkit inside of that container.

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3 thoughts on “Migrating from Owncloud 7 on Debian to Nextcloud 11

  1. recommended upgrade path
    Great to read that the update worked at the end. Just one remark for others wo might want to upgrade.

    > When migrating from OC 9.1 to Nextcloud 10, the OC 9.1 is higher than expected by the Mextcloud upgrade script, so it warns about that you can’t downgrade your installation. The fix was simply to change the OC version in the config.php

    Instead of tricking your Nextcloud by changing the version in the config.php you should chose one of the migration paths described here https://nextcloud.com/migration/

    In general I recommend to go to Nextcloud as early as possible, which in your case would have been ownCloud 7 -> ownCloud 8.0 -> ownCloud 8.1 -> ownCloud 8.2 -> Nextcloud 9.0 -> Nextcloud 10 -> Nextcloud 11

    1. True! I wasn’t all that happy

      True! I wasn’t all that happy about “tweaking” the migration that way as well and it could have been go badly wrong, but luckily I had a backup so I took that risk.

      The reason for migrating late to Nextcloud was the warning about the addressbook and calendars in OC 9.0 release notes. I was not sure if I need to do this in Nextcloud as well or not. Maybe I just didn’t find that part of the Nextcloud documentation covering this.

      1. Thanks for the post as well
        Thanks for the post as well as the clarifications in the comment! I will have to dive into upgrading to Nextcloud in the next few days, and to be honest, I was not looking forward to the problems this might bring with it. I feel much more at ease now.

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