Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Nextcloud External Storage.

So what exactly is external storage in the context of Nextcloud? In simple terms, it is a feature that lets Nextcloud connect to remote file systems and present them to you as regular folders inside the Nextcloud interface. Think of it like a bridge between Nextcloud and storage that lives elsewhere on your network or out in the cloud. Instead of switching between different tools to reach a NAS drive, an FTP server, or a cloud storage bucket, you can see it all in one place through Nextcloud. For NZRT, this is particularly useful because it means the team can access legacy storage and backups without ever leaving the Nextcloud environment.

Let’s talk about what kinds of storage Nextcloud can connect to, because the list is pretty broad. You have SMB and CIFS, which are the protocols used by Windows file shares and popular NAS devices like Synology, QNAP, and TrueNAS. You have NFS, which stands for Network File System and is commonly used with Linux-based NAS setups. There is FTP and SFTP for connecting to remote servers. You have S3 and Swift for cloud object storage. And finally, WebDAV, which lets you connect to another Nextcloud instance or any other WebDAV-compatible server. So whatever storage you are working with, there is a good chance Nextcloud can mount it.

Now let’s look at how NZRT has this set up in practice. The main example is a NAS mount using the SMB protocol. To configure this, you would go into the Settings area and navigate to External Storage. From there, you define a mount point. In NZRT’s case, that mount point is a folder called NAS Archive. You select SMB as the connection type, then provide the host address, which points to the NAS device on the local network. You specify which share on that NAS you want to mount, in this case the archive share. You enter a username and a securely stored password for authentication. And finally, you control which users or groups can see this mount. For NZRT, it is made visible to the finance team, the EDM group, and the Dan user role. That is the entire configuration in a nutshell. A handful of fields, and the storage appears as a folder inside Nextcloud.

Now why would you bother doing this instead of just accessing the NAS directly? There are some solid practical benefits. First, centralized access. Your team does not need separate tools or credentials to get into the NAS. They reach it through Nextcloud just like any other folder. Second, transparent versioning. Nextcloud’s versioning features still apply to files on the NAS, so you get that version history even for files that physically live on external storage. Third, unified sharing. You can use Nextcloud’s permission system to control who sees what on the NAS, rather than managing access separately at the NAS level. And fourth, archive integration. For NZRT specifically, old Dolibarr documents stored on the NAS become accessible through Nextcloud without anyone needing to know where those files physically sit.

In terms of who manages all of this at NZRT, that responsibility falls to the DBA role, which maps to the Dan role on the team. Dan is the person configuring and maintaining these external storage connections.

The bigger picture here is that External Storage is one of the key ways NZRT bridges its newer cloud-first infrastructure with older legacy systems. Not everything lives in Nextcloud natively, and not everything needs to be migrated. External Storage lets you meet your existing storage where it is and bring it into a unified interface, without disrupting anything that is already working.

If you want to go deeper, the Files App documentation, the Administration Overview, and the WebDAV Cheatsheet are all related wiki notes worth exploring.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.