The latest release of NextCloudPi is out!

The biggest change in this release is the update to the latest Debian Buster, which comes with PHP 7.3 for a nice speed boost of around 17% over PHP 7.2.

Other than than we have multi-arch docker containers that include the arm64 architecture, some improvements in our tools and more a new shiny UI to manage backups and snapshots.

Since the Raspberry Pi image is based on the latest Raspbian version, all Raspberry Pi models including the Raspberry Pi 4 are supported.

NextCloudPi improves everyday thanks to your feedback. Please report any problems here. Also, you can discuss anything in the forums, or hang out with us in Telegram.

Last but not least, please download through bittorrent and share it for a while to help keep hosting costs down.

Nextcloud 16

The highlights of this release are improved collaboration and the introduction of AI based security. Check the official announcement for more details.

I would like to remind the community that we follow the production channel, which means that we only do the official major version jump after the second minor version, in this case 16.0.2.

You can absolutely upgrade earlier using NCP tools, and normally it works right away but if you are using automatic Nextcloud upgrades you will only receive the upgrade once it has been tested and reported to work. Also remember to avoid the Nextcloud installer since the NextCloudPi one is more complete and includes any system maintenance tasks that might be required by the upgrade.

Debian Buster

The latest Debian release just became stable. With regards to Nextcloud the main improvement is PHP 7.3 which comes with a speed boost as mentioned above.

The safest way to upgrade is to restore a NextCloudPi backup in the latest image. Alternatively, you can upgrade your current system. If you have not touched your NextCloudPi image the upgrade should just work. In any case there is an associated risk so we should save a NextCloudPi backup and an SD card copy beforehand just in case.

In order to upgrade issue the following commands

sudo ncp-update sudo ncp-dist-upgrade

Should the upgrade fail at some Debian package, you can issue ncp-dist-upgrade again after fixing it to complete the process.

There is no need to go through this risk just yet though. Debian Stretch will still receive security updates until the end of the year. Once we are in Buster we will be up to date for another two years when the next release will come.

Backups and snapshots UI

A new section was added to ncp-web to visualize and manage backups and snapshots. We can download them to our computer from the browser and we can also upgrade by uploading an old backup from our PC.

Multi-arch containers

We added the ARM64 architecture and by using multi-arch containers it is a bit easier to use the Docker version of NextCloudPi. Just docker pull ownyourbits/nextcloudpi and the correct version for your architecture will be installed.

nc-previews-auto

Pre-generating the previews is a must in order to improve user experience in the gallery. The problem is that it can be a very expensive process. Turning on this feature will have our instance take it a bit at a time every night so it doesn’t disrupt our daily usage.

More performance improvements are on their way regarding the gallery. Check out this recent post for more information.

nc-scan-auto improvements

When our file collection is very big it is not practical to scan very frequently to access our externally modified files.

In order to improve this use case we can now select a particular set of directories to scan, and we can make the operation non recursive.

Typically we have a couple folders where we want frequent updates, so we can now refresh their contents in Nextcloud every few minutes to improve our workflow without needing to scan the whole file collection.