Nextcloud and MariaDB

Good question and yes, this is mostly by design, not a mistake on your part.

Short answer: containers separate apps, not storage.

What’s happening is:

  • Nextcloud (the app) runs inside a container
  • Your storage pool is mounted into the container as a volume
  • So from the OS point of view they’re separate, but from inside Nextcloud it looks like “part of the system”

This is normal Docker behavior and not a ZimaOS limitation.

What you can do (and what most people do):

  • Keep Nextcloud app data (config, database, cache) in
    /DATA/AppData/nextcloud
  • Point Nextcloud user data to a dedicated subfolder in your pool, e.g.
    /DATA/NextcloudData

That keeps things clean and makes backups, restores, or even replacing Nextcloud much easier.

So:

  • Containers stay isolated
  • Your storage pool stays shared
  • Data ownership and structure are still fully under your control

ZimaOS is handling this the right way, it gives you separation where it matters (apps), without locking your data away.