Drives come and go. A drive gets too small, a backup drive gets replaced by a bigger one, or the Movies/TV-Shows drive simply isn't needed on the server anymore. But once a drive was mounted during the setup, that mount is persistent - and your server keeps looking for it after every reboot.

Just unplugging the drive is therefore not enough. In the worst case, Nextcloud lands in maintenance mode on the next boot and stays there, because the automount of the drive failed. Snapshot and scrub cronjobs start to report errors, and backups fail with a mail every day.

The new FAQ guide walks you through it, split up by drive type: the encrypted external data SSD/HDD, an unencrypted BTRFS drive like the Movies/TV-Shows drive, unencrypted NTFS drives, Bitlocker encrypted drives and the backup drives. Each section tells you exactly which entries you need to remove from the automount script, the crontab and the fstab so that your server boots cleanly again without the drive.

And there is a second scenario that the guide covers: replacing a drive with a new one. Your old drive got too small? Then you don't want to start from scratch. The guide shows you how to prepare the new drive, copy everything over with rsync and then hand the mountpath of the old drive over to the new one.

That last part is the trick. Your server refers to your drives by their mountpath all over the place - in your SMB-shares, in the local storages and user root folders in Nextcloud, in your PLEX/Jellyfin libraries and in the backup scripts. Give the new drive the mountpath of the old one, and all of that simply keeps working without you having to touch a single one of those configurations. There is one section for the backup drives and one for all other drives.

You can check it out here

Thanks a lot to LeoHobi for suggesting this guide!

Imaginary is a new option in the Additional Apps menu that takes over the generation of previews in your Nextcloud and replaces the Preview Generator.

Scrolling through a folder full of photos should be a pleasure and not a waiting game. Imaginary makes exactly that happen: your thumbnails appear noticeably faster in the Files app, in the Photos app and on your phone. And it does so while replacing Imagick, which was not only slow but also had a track record of security issues.

The best part is what disappears along with it. No more cronjob that grinds through your library at night, and no more mountain of pre-generated previews eating up your disk space - the script offers to clean all of that up for you. Previews are now simply created the moment you need them.

You can find the instructions how to install Imaginary on your server here: click here

Talk Recording is a new option that comes with the High-Performance backend for Nextcloud Talk and lets you record your calls right inside Nextcloud Talk.

Not everyone can always be there. A colleague on vacation, a family member in another timezone, or simply someone who had to leave halfway through - with Talk Recording you just hit record and everyone else can catch up later. Meetings, workshops, family calls: whatever you want to keep, you can keep.

And it stays yours. The recording is rendered on your own server and lands as a video file directly in the Nextcloud of whoever started it, ready to be shared with the others. No external service, no cloud provider, no third party ever sees your call.

You can find the instructions how to install Talk Recording on your server here: click here

Jellyfin is a media server for your own server and now available as a new option now. It is a full alternative to PLEX Media Server.

Jellyfin turns your movies, series, music and photos into a beautiful library with cover art, descriptions and everything else you'd expect - ready to enjoy on your TV, phone, tablet or browser, at home and on the go. And the best part: Jellyfin is completely free and open source. No account, no subscription, no cloud service in between. Features that other media servers reserve for their paying customers are simply included here.

Your media stays exactly where it is and Jellyfin only ever reads from it. Your library gets its own encrypted address and is protected against unwanted visitors right from the start, so you can just lean back and press play.

You can find the instructions how to install Jellyfin on your server here: click here

In the recent past, we've created three new articles that you might be interested in.

The first one is an addition to Nextcloud that allows you to edit/comment PDF files. See this article

Second is a FAQ article about how to use MusicBrainz Picard to edit the metadata of your Audio/Music files. You can find it here: click here

The last is an article about a script that allows you to shrink your database if it got too big which may happen over time if you are using the external storage app that is part of the Nextcloud-Nas-Guide. See this article

In order to make your server as secure as possible, you might consider blocking all access from outside your home network. To be able to connect to your server yourself from outside your home network afterwards, you'll need to establish a VPN connection to your home network first before you can access your server. We've implemented the whole process in a way that automatic certificate renewal via Let's Encrypt will still work after blocking the access to your server which is usually a limitation of this process but not by following this guide. Additionally, scan.nexcloud.com will still be able to scan your Nextcloud regarding security problems as well as observatory.mozilla.org.

You can find the instructions how to only allow access to your server from inside your home network here: click here

If you've followed this guide, you will have configured automatic updates. Those get executed every saturday at 18:00 and will cause a reboot of your server afterwards. This is especially problematic if you've configured Pi-hole as your local DNS server for your home network since any DNS request will not work for as long as the server reboots and the Pi-hole isn't reachable. Also, if you've installed Pi-hole it will try to update itself every saturday at 19:30 which causes the same effect if an update is available.

To fix this, you can change the time when the updates get executed. Here is how to do this (instructions)

After a recent switch to new server hardware, I've discovered that Nextcloud wasn't performing better than before although the hardware and software configuration got better by a lot which pointed to a bottleneck somewhere else. Because of my findings, I've decided to create a new FAQ guide how to improve the performance of your Nextcloud installation. You can find it here

There are two new options available that make your server even more secure.

You can find the instructions how and why you should enable the Firewall on your server here: click here

After the initial setup is done, there might be the demand to create new users that were initially not considered. Since it isn't very clear currently how to do that, we've decided to create this FAQ guide.

You can check it out here