Using NextCloud for online storage

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I have read the FAQ that says clearly that MIAB should not be used for anything else than mail, but I have a large amount of disk space left on the VPS where my MIAB is installed and I would really like to use the NextCloud to also store my documents, not just contracts and calendar.

I’ve been doing that for awhile, it seem to work great so far, but I’d like to have a better understanding of why it’s not t recommended to do that before continuing.

Thank you in advance for any insight as to why it wouldn’t be a good idea and the risks involved

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Let me rephrase what you have read:

The MiaB server should not be used for any other clients other than the ones installed by the MiaB installation script.

As Nextcloud is installed it is perfectly OK to use, however, it was installed to provide calendar and contacts functionality ONLY. Any use beyond that is unsupported by the developers of MiaB, so if you run into problems, you are on your own. Knowing that some people may want to fully utilize NextCloud, there is a script available to unlock the admin functions of NC located at /mailinabox/tools/owncloud-unlockadmin.sh. Running this script will create an unsupported modification and you will then be on your own to solve any problems that may arise. But with the community support available for MiaB and NextCloud, that likely will not be an issue.

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One of the primary reasons it is not recommended by MIAB team, is that it is backed by a SQLite database. Even Nextcloud themselves recommend to move away from SQLite. This database keeps tracks of MIAB users, aliases and a few other items but when syncing files with Nextcloud it also keeps track of which files have synced, need to be synced, the location of these files on the filesystem etc.

SQLite has two major drawbacks that I am aware of

  1. Concurrency - the entire database is locked when one transaction is taking place and thus performance becomes a problem under anything but the lightest loads - try having multiple users concurrently sync files to see this for yourself.
  2. Stability - this is probably related to the db locking mechanism but there are many horror stories of sqlite dbs crashing. See this thread on Nextcloud site. The official Nextcloud docs also recommend to change from SQLite to a better performing database. Don’t try this on your MIAB installation - it will break many things!
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Thanks Brett, this is exactly the answer was looking for.

I’ll then be moving my data to a new dedicated mariadb-based NextCloud host.

Needless to say that MIAB with a mariadb-based NextCloud out-of-the-box would be awesome because even contacts and calendar would benefit from the added stability.

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