If you want to transfer many gigs of data to a Nextcloud server, you probably want to use the command line instead of a browser. This quick HOWTO is an overview of using davfs2 to get the job done.
(Condensed and enhanced from here https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/user_manual/en/files/access_webdav.html)
Steps:
Install the software
yum install davfs
Create mount directory
mkdir ~/nextcloud
Create a credentials directory
mkdir ~/.davfs2
Copy the default secrets file
cp /etc/davfs2/secrets ~/.davfs2 chmod 600 ~/.davfs2/secrets
Edit secrets file
Add information about the local mount point and the remote Nextcloud username and password that’s you’ll be logging into:
mc -e ~/.davfs2/secrets /home/user/nextcloud username password
Note: I wasn’t very successful with this, every time I tried to mount I *still* had to type the username and password.
Fix locks
When you start bulk copying, you might see it copy directories but fail on every single file. In the install document they refer to Resource temporarily available and this worked for me:
mc -e /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf use_locks 0
Add your Linux user to the davfs2 group
usermod -aG davfs2 root
You’ll get 404 errors if you don’t.
Mount the disk
sudo mount -t davfs https://cloud.example.com/remote.php/dav/files/username/ ~/nextcloud
umount the disk
umount ~/nextcloud
This didn’t work for me, in spite of the /etc/fstab entry as stated below:
mount ~/nextcloud
/etc/fstab had this:
# Nextcloud mount https://cloud.example.com/nextcloud/remote.php/dav/files/username/ /home/username/nextcloud davfs user,rw,auto 0 0
Troubleshooting
Certificate issues
I kept on getting certificate warning when trying to mount. It turns out I was using a really old CentOS 6 or 7 box and root certificates weren’t up to date. Make sure your root certificates are up to date:
yum install ca-certificates
You should see “update” somewhere when you run this.
Certificate issue two
I also had a problem that it didn’t understand the Let’s Encrypt and kept on thinking it had expired. I found a great solution on Stack that allow you to grab a remote cert and store it locally:
openssl s_client -connect cloud.bs-inc.co.za:443 -showcerts </dev/null 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -outform PEM > certificate.pem mv certificate.pem /etc/davfs2/certs/certificate.pem
Job Status
If you’re doing this work from another Linux server to your Nextcloud instance, you probably want to run the job in the background.
The command is probably something like cp -ru * /mnt/usb/backup /home/username/nextcloud &
If you have to see the job, do this:
jobs
If you want to bring the job to the foreground, do this:
fg %# e.g. fg %1