I use ownCloud on a few of my machines for keeping some folders synced via the desktop syncing client. I’m fairly happy with it, at least for smaller files like documents and pictures. (Part of this is because I’m running the server on a Raspberry Pi, which is a little slow, but for my purposes works fine.) Recently, however, I ran into a problem with version 1.8.1 of the desktop client, running on a laptop with Xubuntu 15.10. Basically, every time I started the client it would ask me for my username, password, and folder list, as if I were configuring it for the first time. This happened when just logging in (when I have it set to start automatically), or if I killed it and restarted it.
The fix turned out to be relatively simple. First, the desktop client stores its configuration files (on Linux) here:
$HOME/.local/share/data/ownCloud/
In that directory I found the following:
cookies.db folders owncloud.cfg socket
But when I tried to display the file owncloud.cfg, I got an Input/Output error. I could list the folders directory; this just contained a file with conf info for each of the folder I sync. On a hunch I deleted owncloud.cfg, and restarted the client. It asked for my login information again, and then I told it to skip the folder configuration. It worked, and even picked up the folders I had set up to sync (as those configuration files were readable). I’m not sure what caused this, but after doing this I can view the new owncloud.cfg file that was created.
Hopefully this save someone some time. It’s a little aggrivating that I did have to poke around in the terminal, but not too bad – at least it’s possible. I’m not sure if this could be a bug in the client, but if this happens again I’ll reevaluate.