Issue with adding external hard drive to Nextcloud

Support and Troubleshooting
1

Hello, after updating to 1.4 I have added a 2TB external hard drive. However, I also would love to add this drive to NextCloud. The drive is visible but with 0kb although there already are files and folder on it. I’ve tried resolving the issue with Grok 3 but no result.

Nextcloud on Umbrel OS 1.4 can’t access my external drive (/dev/sda2, mounted at /home/umbrel/umbrel/external/StoreJet). The container sees the internal NVMe drive (/dev/nvme0n1p4) instead, showing 0 files despite files being visible on the host. Binding the volume in docker-compose.yml (/home/umbrel/umbrel/external/StoreJet:/mnt/storejet) doesn’t work, and manually mounting /dev/sda2 in the container fails with “permission denied.”

What we’ve tried:

  • Added - /home/umbrel/umbrel/external/StoreJet:/mnt/storejet to docker-compose.yml, but the container still sees /dev/nvme0n1p4.
  • Changed it to use /mnt/storejet to avoid conflicts, no success.
  • Attempted manual mount (mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/test) in the container, got “permission denied.”
  • Confirmed the host mount works (ls /home/umbrel/umbrel/external/StoreJet shows files).
  • Next steps involve testing with --privileged or adding devices: - /dev/sda2:/dev/sda2 to docker-compose.yml.

Thanks for shedding a light on this.

2

I will try to reformat the disc as ext4 (think now it’s a Windows format).

3

From all of the above, it seems to be a permissions issue.
Personally, I would stop modifying the .yml files and leave all the code as it was originally. I would check the permissions of the disk you want to use or the folder on that disk. If those permissions only let you “see” the disk or folder but not access the contents, I would change only the permissions.