Truenas nextcloud mount point question

This is my first post and access of this forum so I apologize in advance for anything inappropriate.
Please correct me and point me in the right direction.

I’ve watched many of Tom’s Youtubes on truenas, syncthing, and nextcloud and note how he creates a dataset and maps it to a jail be it nextcloud or syncthing.

I installed both as a plugin/jail in TrueNAS-12.0-U5.1 after which neither has any mount point defined. (OK. Fair enough.)

But I note that with nextcloud (12.2-RELEASE-p10), each nextcloud defined user gets some files/directories WITHIN the nextcloud jail and these installation defined files are duplicates of one another.
They reside in /mnt/pool/iocage/jails/nextcloud/root/usr/local/www/nextcloud/data/user/files.

  1. Any comment or thoughts? ie., is it ‘correct’ or ‘normal’ or appropriate to keep files, any files, within the jail rather than mount point mapping them outside?

  2. If they ought to be moved out, what is the technique? I’m not fluent with linux terminal commands.

  3. What is ‘best practice’ here? should these common files be mapped to a common dataset outside of the jail that all the users can access? or just moved out to datasets unique to each defined user? (or just not moved at all)

  4. Nextcloud specific question: Can one sftp or terminal copy/move files or directories into the defined (mount point) mapped location for a given nextcloud defined user? That is, will Nextcloud treat it as if it were sync’ed nextcloud to nextcloud? I have an old nextcloud dataset in a pool in truenas and want to get it into the newest nextcloud version and pool just created.

  5. Syncthing specific question. Same a #4 above but for syncthing.

Thank you in advance,
Steve

Best practice for jails/container systems is to keep the data separate form the application. This way you can update the application independent of the data.

I am not a NextCloud user so hard to say specifically, I do use Syncthing but with that there is not a concept defined by user, it’s just permissions to allow Syncthing access to the files.

Thank you LTS_Tom.
Regards, Steve

@stevenba

I used this guide to setup my homelab Nextcloud within FreeBSD (FreeNAS) jail. I goes into how to create datasets for the various things required by Nextcloud and the datasets are separate from the individual jail. It might help you – How to install Nextcloud on FreeNAS in an iocage jail with hardened security - Samuel Dowling

Thank you kevdog for the link to this documentation and information. It will provide me with info, answers, hints, and more than a few hours of research and study.