Separate OC data and user storage

[EnricoBilla]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

As a sysadmin, I'd like to maintain a distinction between Opencloud data and user storage. In the deployment, I understand that I can use OC_DATA_DIR to mount a volume to Opencloud for data. However, that folder contains both Opencloud data and user data. As I understand it, user data is stored in the STORAGE_USERS_POSIX_ROOT folder (relative to the Docker volume mount point).

Describe the solution you'd like

I would like separate mount points for internal Opencloud data and user storage (the only data I need to back up). For example:

    volumes:
      ...
      - ${OC_CONFIG_DIR:-opencloud-config}:/etc/opencloud
      - ${OC_DATA_DIR:-opencloud-data}:/var/lib/opencloud
      - ${OC_USER_DIR:-opencloud-user-data}:/var/lib/opencloud/storage/users/users

I haven't implemented this yet because I'm not sure if every user file is located there. If this setup should work as expected and there's interest in this feature, I'm willing to open a PR.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Currently, I set OC_DATA_DIR to a folder on the host machine (/mnt/opencloud) and mounted a drive to /mnt/opencloud/storage/users/users. Every user file should be there, and it currently works. However, I'm not certain it contains everything I need, and this setup might change in the future.

Other info

I'm using opencloud_full version 2.0.0, with default posixfs.

If there's already a better solution for my use case, please let me know!

[micbar]

@EnricoBilla Good Idea!

Could you imagine to contribute that to the opencloud_full example?

[EnricoBilla]

@micbar Yes of course I do!
Only problem I noticed while implementing it for my setup is that it's not possible to mount just the storage/users/users subdirectory; it works by mounting the additional volume to storage/users which contains indexes and metadata too.
I think it doesn't work because Opencloud on the first run expects the users folder not to be there.
Anyway, it can be done. How do you prefer the env var and the volume to be called?
As I don't know the codebase, should I document this somewhere?

[micbar]

@butonic Can you please clarify?

[CoolnsX]

[Unit]
Description=Opencloud Container

[Container]
Pod=opencloud.pod
ContainerName=opencloud
Image=docker.io/opencloudeu/opencloud-rolling:latest

# Enable auto-update container
AutoUpdate=registry
# pass this to attach it to container
EnvironmentFile=./.env

# metadata and configuration store here
Volume=%h/podman/opencloud/config:/etc/opencloud
Volume=%h/podman/opencloud/data:/var/lib/opencloud

# actual data store here
Volume=${EXTERNAL_DIR}:/var/lib/opencloud/storage/users/users

[Service]
# pass this to autofill above variables
EnvironmentFile=%h/.config/containers/systemd/opencloud/.env
Restart=always
TimeoutStartSec=300

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

I have already done this, it's working great.

I think it doesn't work because Opencloud on the first run expects the users folder not to be there.

I moved to this strategy, after setting up my opencloud.

also the $EXTERNAL_DIR is directory on a drive mounted (it's HDD) but all the metadata is on SSD.

So, lots of storage with faster file access, sure it takes a delay for hard drive to spin up, but it's once and after that it's fast and snappy.

And I use Podman btw (the syntax above is for Podman Quadlet), cause I have had episodes of Docker crashing on me. ☹️