nextcloud-ng_backup/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to NG Backup are documented here. The format follows Keep a Changelog; versioning follows the stages in PLAN.md section 9. The <version> in appinfo/info.xml is plain SemVer-numeric on purpose: the app store accepts a -beta suffix, but Nextcloud servers then only offer the release on the beta/daily update channel, which would hide the app from most admins. The stability stage is instead carried by the app description, the git tag, the release, and this file.

0.9.6-beta.7 - 2026-10-14

Bugfix release for SMB locations, with occ backup:cancel to stop a backup that does not get anywhere. Tested on a production instance: a first full backup of 151,021 files (807 GiB) to OVH S3 completed, and a backup to a Hetzner Storage Box over SMB that had slowed to 12 GiB in 35 hours ran at about 5.6 MiB/s after the update, while the S3 backup was still reading.

Added

• The list of backup runs (web interface and occ backup:status) shows the total size of each backup next to what it uploaded: an incremental backup of 1 TB that uploads 800 MB now shows both. occ backup:status shows sizes in GiB where that reads better than MiB.
• occ backup:cancel <run> stops a running backup; occ backup:status shows the run numbers. No new step of the run starts, the step in progress finishes (usually within a minute), then the process working on the run (occ backup:run or cron) stops. What it already stored is removed by the next cleanup. A backup started by an earlier version is stopped as well: after two minutes it is marked cancelled while it works, and its process stops at the end of the step.

Fixed

• Backups to SMB locations, and to other slow locations with many packs, slowed to a crawl: each 30-second step opened the location again, and reading the list of index files took longer than the step itself. Each step then stored a single 4 MiB pack, which made the list longer still. A first full backup of 0.8 TB to a Hetzner Storage Box over SMB managed 12 GiB in 35 hours. occ backup:run and system cron now open the location once per run, opening no longer counts towards the step's time, and SMB folders are listed in one request instead of one per file. A backup to an SMB location that is not getting anywhere keeps running in its old process after the update: update first, then stop it with occ backup:cancel <run> and start it again. The new backup reuses the packs the old one stored.

0.9.5-beta.6 - 2026-10-12

Bugfix release for SFTP locations and large repositories. Tested on a production instance with a 1 TB repository on a Hetzner Storage Box over SFTP: a check in 5.5 minutes, a deep check of all 316,529 blobs (815 GiB) in 11 hours, and an incremental backup in under 8 minutes.

Added

• Progress of a running backup in the web interface and occ backup:status, e.g. "running (files) 68%". The total is the size of the previous snapshot; for a first backup it is estimated from Nextcloud's file cache (users' files, versions and trash) and shown as "~68%".
• Edit a backup location (web interface and occ backup:target:edit): change the password, host, folder, connection type or name without losing its history. Before this the only option was a new location, which starts an empty repository and, with a retention lock at the provider, keeps paying for the old one. The new settings are only saved when they lead to the same repository; stored passwords are never sent to the browser, and an empty password field keeps the stored one. Administrators are notified of the change.
• occ backup:verify reports how far it is every 30 seconds, and occ backup:status shows the progress of a running check and how the last check of each location ended. On a large repository a check takes hours, a deep one days.

Changed

• Checking and opening a large repository over SFTP is much faster: the index files (one per pack, 27,547 for 1 TB) are downloaded 32 at a time instead of one after the other, 114 instead of 6 files per second to a Hetzner Storage Box (about 4 minutes instead of 77 for 1 TB). A check of a repository with more than 256 packs also lists the pack folders (256 requests) instead of asking for every pack.
• App store listing: the author's e-mail address is shown.
• App store listing: the homepage link points to the GitHub repository instead of back to the app store page itself.
• The notification for a location without a successful backup read "No successful backup to … since never" when there had never been one; it now reads "No successful backup to … yet".

Fixed

• 0.9.4 could not open a repository at the root of an SFTP location (empty path): its faster SFTP reads sent their first request before phpseclib had opened the SFTP channel, which only happens on the first SFTP call after login. Every backup then failed with "No repository at this location". The channel is now opened first.
• A check (occ backup:verify) did not renew its hold on the location while it downloaded the index; on a large repository that takes longer than the hold lasts, so a weekly cleanup could have started during the check.
• A long first backup could end as failed although its snapshot was complete: when its final step took longer than the step's lease (150 s with occ backup:run), the background job took the run over, finished it a second time and failed on the snapshot it had already recorded, overwriting the result. The lease now lasts at least 15 minutes, a step writes the run only if no other process wrote it since the step loaded it (in one database statement), and recording a snapshot that is already recorded is no longer an error.
• occ backup:verify on a large repository failed with "SFTP connection failed while opening snapshots/…" or "Not found: snapshots/…". A Hetzner Storage Box drops an SFTP connection that carried a lot of data (some 40 MB) and then stayed quiet for a few minutes, and the check went quiet after downloading the index: it refreshed the local index cache, first in 29 minutes (a pass over all blobs for every pack: 27,547 packs, 400,000 blobs for 1 TB), then still in more than 6 minutes (a database transaction per pack on PostgreSQL). Nextcloud's SFTP storage keeps using a dropped connection, on which every file looks missing. Now:
  • an SFTP connection that was not used for a minute is checked first, and one that turns out to be dead after a failed request is replaced, once per request; uploads, moves and deletes are only checked first, never repeated;
  • the index cache is written in one transaction (27,547 packs in 11 seconds on a test server, against about a minute row by row);
  • after a check the cache holds the index files as they are: before, a blob that was in two packs was only cached for one of them.

0.9.4-beta.5 - 2026-10-09

Bugfix release: faster restores.

Fixed

• Restores and occ backup:verify --deep fetched every blob with its own request, so on a remote location they ran far below the speed of the connection. The blobs of a pack are now read from one open stream, in the order they were written. Restoring 86 MB in 202 files from a Hetzner Storage Box over SMB went from 0.78 MB/s to 4.2 MB/s, the speed of reading the packs as plain files over that connection.
• Reading from an SFTP location waited a full round trip for every 256 KiB, whatever the line speed. Reads now keep up to 8 requests in flight. Restoring 1.97 GB in 500 files from a Hetzner Storage Box (47 ms away) took 694 s before the fix above, 499 s with it and 142 s with both (2.8 → 3.9 → 13.9 MB/s); a full 51 GB restore ran at 13.0 MB/s. When a server error interrupts such a read, it goes on from the same position with Nextcloud's own SFTP stream; after three failing files in a row, or on a Nextcloud whose SFTP library lacks what this needs, only Nextcloud's own stream is used.
• README: a WebDAV location on a slow upload needs a higher davstorage.request_timeout.

0.9.3-beta.4 - 2026-10-08

Bugfix release.

Fixed

• A backup failed with "cannot execute INSERT in a read-only transaction" on PostgreSQL as soon as the database dump filled a whole pack (32 MiB): the pack's index cache row was written inside the read-only dump transaction. On other databases that row was rolled back silently.
• Backups to a remote location slowed down as the repository grew: every backup step listed the repository's index with a round trip per file. Over SFTP to a Hetzner Storage Box a 60 GiB repository already lost a large part of each step to it; backing up continuously (occ backup:run) went from 45 KiB/s to 5.8 MB/s with the fix.

0.9.2-beta.3 - 2026-10-08

Bugfix release.

Added

• README: notes on using a Hetzner Storage Box over WebDAV and SMB.

Fixed

• Adding a backup location in the web interface failed with "Request failed with status code 403" when the login was more than 30 minutes old: the form did not ask for password confirmation.
• Settings page: the "Backup and restore" / "Settings" tabs line up with the sections below them.
• Backups: the runs table scrolls horizontally on narrow screens instead of running off the page.
• occ backup:verify --deep: a blob that could not be read (network or storage error) was reported as "corrupted or tampered". Reads are now retried, and a read that keeps failing is reported separately as unreadable, with the error (run the check again; if the same blobs stay unreadable, their pack may be damaged or truncated). Only a blob that was read but fails decryption or its hash check counts as corrupted. Found on a Hetzner Storage Box over WebDAV, where the blob turned out to be intact.

0.9.1-beta.2 - 2026-10-07

Second beta, the first release in the Nextcloud app store (signed).

Added

• App store listing: screenshots, website, repository and documentation link in appinfo/info.xml.

Fixed

• Restore: the "new folder" option showed "Restored " without the date pattern.
• Restore: the restore-point dropdown cut off the time.
• Settings: the passphrase actions are on one line instead of stacked.
• docs/HOWTO.md: the SFTP example used a non-existent auth mechanism (sftp::password instead of password::password).

0.9.0-beta.1 - 2026-10-07

First beta. Tested thoroughly and usable alongside your current backup, but not yet a drop-in replacement for it. We test what we can ourselves (Nextcloud 32–35, SQLite, MariaDB and PostgreSQL, S3, SFTP, FTP, SMB and NFS), but we need field experience from other setups: please report what works and what doesn't, especially on large instances and on storage providers not listed in the README.

Added

• Disaster recovery: occ backup:key:import and occ backup:restore:full restore the database, data directory and config onto a fresh installation of the same major version.
• Per-user backup and restore via user_migration: occ backup:user:backup and occ backup:user:restore (replace the account after a safety export, or restore as <uid>-bak), also onto a server where the user does not exist yet. The commands ask before installing user_migration (or take --install-user-migration).
• Checksum audit: occ backup:verify, shallow or --deep, for snapshots and per-user exports.
• Retention for per-user exports: occ backup:retention --user-last=N.
• FTP and SMB covered by the integration tests; NFS through the local backend on a mounted share.
• docs/HOWTO.md: step by step from setup to a tested restore.
• Warnings when a backup finishes with unreadable files or folders, or with files that kept changing while being read (log, occ, notification, snapshot).

Changed

• backup:restore:full refuses on an installation with more than one user and asks first; backup:user:restore --mode=replace asks before deleting an existing account (--force for scripts in both cases).
• A failed scheduled backup is retried at most three times a day, an hour apart.
• The recovery kit carries the deletion delay; the kit file is created owner-only.
• Adding a location through the web API needs password confirmation.

Fixed

• Exports of users whose id contains .part- could be deleted by cleanup on remote locations.
• Cleanup no longer frees the data of a per-user export whose manifest is missing.
• Crash safety of moving snapshots to and from the trash, of catalog writes by concurrent backups and per-user exports, and of short uploads.
• A file that keeps changing no longer makes a backup restart forever.
• Long restores and exports keep their lock on the location alive.
• Floating-point database columns are dumped exactly.

Known limitations

See "Known limitations" in the README: memory use on very large instances, never two servers writing to one location, removing a passphrase slot does not revoke access, no rollback detection before a disaster recovery, and a few smaller points. None of them block the road to 1.0.0; they are on the backlog in PLAN.md.

0.1.0-alpha.1 - 2026-10-05

First public alpha. Feature-complete for phase 1: scheduled, encrypted, incremental backups, and restore of files and folders. Not for production use — test on a copy of production (dev, test, staging). Full disaster recovery (backup:restore:full on a fresh installation) is phase 2 and not implemented yet.

Added

• Encrypted (XChaCha20-Poly1305), content-addressed, deduplicated, incremental backups, streamed from source to destination without a local copy of the data.
• Backup locations via files_external's own backend/auth classes, without ever mounting the location: S3 (and compatible services), SFTP, WebDAV, FTP, Swift, or a local path.
• A recovery kit with up to three passphrase slots, mandatory download-and-confirm before the first backup runs, and an optional encrypted copy by email.
• Resumable, time-boxed background jobs (database dump, file walk, upload), so a run survives short PHP time limits and a crash is resumed, never restarted, without leaving the instance in maintenance mode.
• Database dump and restore without external tools, via Nextcloud's own IDBConnection/DBAL, streamed through the same pipeline as file data.
• Restore of files and folders via the web interface and occ, into a new folder, merged, or replacing the original (with the previous content going to the trash).
• Retention policy (last/daily/weekly/monthly), prune with pack repacking, and a snapshot trash with a configurable deletion delay.
• Append-only locations and documented recommendations against ransomware and a compromised server (object lock, delete-less credentials, off-site copies).
• Admin settings page (locations, schedule, retention, key management) and a JSON API.
• Notifications and an admin setup check for a failed or overdue backup.
• CI: unit tests on PHP 8.2–8.4, and an end-to-end backup→restore round trip on Nextcloud 32–35 × SQLite/MariaDB/PostgreSQL, and against real S3 and SFTP backends (not just a local path).

Known limitations

• No full/disaster-recovery restore yet (phase 2).
• No per-user backup/restore via user_migration yet (phase 2).
• No FTP/SMB coverage in CI yet, and no verification/checksum-audit command yet (phase 2).
• See the "Storage backend experiences" section of the README for provider-specific quirks found so far (e.g. Hetzner Storage Box sub-accounts).