At this point the issue is clear from your output.
Your storage folders are owned by root:root, so your user will not have access regardless of reset, format, or migration.
This isn’t related to migration or where your data lives, it’s purely filesystem ownership.
Without changing ownership or testing with a properly created folder from the UI, the behaviour won’t change.
At this stage, if you want to continue troubleshooting:
either fix ownership
or create a brand new folder from the UI and test access there
Otherwise we won’t get a different result.
How do I change ownership then? What am I doing wrong that’s causing this? I create folders only from the UI. I don’t get it. I’m testing most of the time from formatted drives and fresh installations, when is this ownership starting?
I think I found the answer to myself. Gemini helped me out understand I was thinking wrong.
So basically ZimaOS is designed to be a single user system when managing apps, so only one admin, and that one admin installs and manages apps.
Other users can have access to a their own home folder as a samba service, and can use the apps, mostly the ones that support multiple users by themselves like, immich, nextcloud, etc. so the ZimaOS UI that creates new users is mostly, if not only, for SMB services.
So, since I was coming from DSM which every user can have granted specific privileges and can install their own apps I was thinking ZimaOS could too, this is the reason when I log in as another user I couldn’t have access to the hard drives and apps and I recieved the “permission denied” error, only the admin can.
So since I’m the only one in the family who really plays around with the apps I made my account the admin directly and my family members will have access to file storage managed by nextcloud and photo archive by immich, just my wife needs access to a folder as smb to make the Time Machine backups from her Mac. There is no point in logging into the server, I mean on the dashboard, as a user, the “permission denied” error will always be there
Can anyone correct me if I’m wrong?
I still have to try out the samba connection though, because, from the ZimaOS UI, from the folder “Manage samba share” option, when I copy and paste the windows explorer path it can’t find it on Windows, but that problem is for another time.
I’ve got to say, I was sold on this OS for the simplicity and many reccomend it for home use and friendliness but so far I’ve fund little friendliness. What a headache! Almost a month working on it and I still cannot reccomend my family to put their stuff in it.
Thank you for your feedback, Zimaos is indeed far from doing enough for the current multi-user related functions, and the Zimaos development team is currently working on solving multi-user related problems(Apps/Files/Access)
For the 2 apps you mentioned: 1. immich, this currently recommends that you can create multiple accounts (you and your family) directly in the app, so that your photos are isolated. 2. NextCloud This app We have found that users may empty all files in the corresponding folder when installing this app for the first time, so please pay attention to choosing an empty folder as the mapping directory when installing the app