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Welcome to the advanced Sciebo-Documentation!
Here you can find Explanations for basic functionality and also some tips and tricks for more advanced users.
Basic functionality is also explained on our homepage.
Your instance has probably been migrated. Please find more information here: Nextcloud-Migration
If your account name has changed (e.g. because you have moved to another university and have received a new ID), you must register again. Unfortunately, you cannot continue to use your old account. If necessary, you can manually move your data from the old to the new account.
As long as your ID has not changed, you only need to renew your sciebo account in my.sciebo to update your data.
As long as your ID has not changed, you only need to renew your sciebo account in my.sciebo to update your data.
Once you have left your institution, you cannot extend your sciebo account anymore. Your account will be locked after a grace period of a year after the last extension and afterward deleted. If you have forgotten to back up your files, you can open a support ticket.
Unfortunately, students cannot increase their storage volume at the moment.
You can apply for a project box.
Please notify your sponsor; they can send you a password reset link via the guest management in mysciebo.
Once per year you have to confirm that you are still eligble to use sciebo. The grant conditions of the state of NRW require that only students and employees of participating institutes may use sciebo. Having users confirm their eligibility once per year affords us to offer a grace period, whereas other approaches where we get the confirmation automatically from the institutes would mean that you lose access to sciebo the second you are not member of the institute anymore.
No, the protocols mentioned are not supported. You can use sciebo via the web interface, the desktop client or the apps.
In general, it is possible to use sciebo via WebDAV. We explicitly advise against using
sciebo as a Networkdrive or mounting it via webdavfs, as this reliably leads
to data loss. Other webDAV clients might work just fine, but we can not offer
any support for those. Best to use sciebo via the web interface, the desktop
client or the apps.
If you leave your institution, you can no longer renew your sciebo account, and it will be blocked after a grace period (of max. 1 year from the last renewal) and subsequently deleted. If you forgot to back up your data before the blocking, open a support ticket.
rclone can be run well on several headless platforms.
Please note that rclone is not as smart as the sciebo client when it comes to
discovering changes, so please use it to sync as infrequently as you can
afford on larger datasets or explicitly check for changes of small subsets of
your data.
There may be various reasons why data can no longer be found. First check the following solutions:
If your data could not be restored in this way, open a support ticket. Please also remember to make regular backups of your data.
If - despite the client being connected - there are no options for selecting or deselecting folders, it is usually because your client uses the Virtual File System (VFS). There only metadata is being synchronized to your system and files are being downloaded on demand, so only very little disk space is used.
The VFS is a Feature which can be used on Windows or Mac to use only very little diskspace. Files are only downloaded on demand and reflected by placeholder files.
However, on the downside you can not make backups from your sciebo files this way, so this is mainly an option for workstations shared by multiple users.
The webinterface lies: overleaf does not send e-mails. You can only share with people who have logged into the sciebo overleaf at least once and created a project. Then you can share with their regular sciebo ID they use at their sciebo instance; you do not need to use the federated ID (the one with the double @).
We currently use a (somewhat dated) version of the open source version of overleaf, which can be found at GitHub and are unable to provide additional features. The current featureset is somewhere between their proprietary free and basic tier.
Also, sending emails to other (especially external) users is not possible. To share a project, the receiver has to log in at least once into Overleaf and create a project.
Sadly no. The current installation is only partially integrated in sciebo. It is therefore currently not possible to im- or export data from sciebo directly.
It is possible however, to export and import projects as .zip-files.
Since we use the open source version of Overleaf from GitHub as it is, it is currently not possible to add additional features.
Unfortunately, this is currently not possible.
Probably your sciebo instance has been migrated to Nextcloud. Groups can now be found under Contacts/Teams.
This is sadly a known bug during the Nextcloud migration. Please open a support ticket with your university e-mail adress.
If you only need to receive a couple of files once, but which are too large for email attachments, you can use a public link filedrop. For this log into the webinterface and create a folder in which you want to receive the file(s) and then click the share button; there you select the tab “public links” and then you create a link with password, expiry date and upload rights. Please do not use the built-in mail function, but just create the link. Once the link is created, you can copy it to your clipboard from the right side menu in the webinterface and then send it, together with the password, to the person(s) you want to receive files from.
Making backups is just part of good data hygiene. Sciebo is a collaborative workspace and not a backup vault. Several scenarios can lead to data loss:
OnlyOffice is open source and is hosted on our own servers. This mode of operation is impossible with Microsoft Office. Thus both data souvereignity and security considerations exclude the operation of Microsoft Office 365. Furthermore does Micrsofot Office work not as reliable on the scale of sciebo.
For open document formats we also offer Collabora on those instances, which already have been migrated to Nextcloud.
Please refer to our German outage document.
In case of outages we usually lack the time to update two languages.
The desktop client is a program that allows you to store your data from the cloud locally on your computer or laptop. The client runs in the background and automatically synchronises your data so that you always have the latest version of a file available on all devices.
The app for mobile devices is ideal for viewing and sharing files on the go. You can upload, delete and move files (such as photos). However, because mobile devices usually have limited storage space, your files are not automatically downloaded. A file is not saved on your device until you manually access it.
Please note that we are currently migrating from ownCloud to Nextcloud. Therefore, this section contains clients for both ownCloud and Nextcloud. If you are not sure which client to install, please refer to the list of migrated instances. Further information on migrating to Nextcloud can be found here.
Before installing the new client, the old client needs to be uninstalled.
Alternatively, you can remove the synchronization and set it up anew.
As long as not all sciebo instances have been migrated, iOS users can use the unbranded Nextcloud client from the app store.
For Android, you can use the following APK:
In my.sciebo you can access information about your user account, change your password, extend the term of your account and delete your account. As a university employee, you can also increase your storage volume from 30 to 500 GB.
Open my.sciebo. (You must authenticate with your institution to do this.)
Click on “Account Information”. There you can view the following information:
Your account is valid for 12 months from the date of renewal. As long as you are a member of your institution, you can renew your account at any time.
If you delete your account, your data stored in sciebo will be irrevocably removed from the sciebo servers. Locally stored data (i.e. data synchronised via the desktop client) will remain on your PC.
Please note that shares will also be deleted. This means that data you have shared with other users will no longer be available to them. If necessary, inform these users in good time so that they can make their own copies. You can view a list of all folders and files you have shared in the web interface.
As an employee, you have the option of increasing your storage volume to 500 GB on your own.
If you use the Thunderbird email programme with the *cloud - FileLink extension, you can upload large email attachments to Sciebo and then just send the download link.
Follow the download link to download the suitable file for your operating system, then run the file and follow the instructions for installation.
Thunderbird -> Settings -> Composition -> Attachments -> Find more providers...
*Add *cloud in the Attachments sectionhttps://sciebo.uni-muenster.de)SaveWhen composing an e-mail, click on the drop-down menu next to " 📎Anhängen” and select Filelink -> *cloud.
Select the file you want to attach and click ‘Open’.
The selected file will now be uploaded to your Sciebo account and the recipient of your e-mail can download the file using the link.
Sometimes data is generated automatically somewhere and you want to move it to a specific Sciebo folder. Preferably in an automated way.
In this case, you can share the folder via a link and create a share with write permission (and password).
The link will look something like this:
https://uni-muenster.sciebo.de/s/XphYPtnTxc2MDm0 and the password could be secter. The part after the /s/ is the
username that you would use to interact with the webdav interface https://uni-muenster.sciebo.de/public.php/webdav/ and
the password is the corresponding password.
You can now send a request to the Sciebo webdav interface for example with Curl and upload a file data.csv via:
curl -u "XphYPtnTxc2MDm0:geheim" -T "daten.csv" https://uni-muenster.sciebo.de/public.php/webdav/daten.csv
Note that the webdav interface does not have an update verb (as far as we know), i.e. if you want to overwrite a file,
you must first delete the file using the following command:
curl -u "XphYPtnTxc2MDm0:geheim" -X DELETE https://uni-muenster.sciebo.de/public.php/webdav/daten.csv
The Joplin app allows you to create notes on your smartphone or desktop/notebook and synchronise them via sciebo. You can download the apps at https://joplinapp.org/.
To synchronize the Joplin using Sciebo go to Tools -> Options -> Synchronisation
uni-muenster.username@uni-muenster.deDuring synchronisation, a new folder Joplin will be created in your Sciebo folder. Your Joplin notes will be stored in this folder.
In sciebo wie currently offer two Office integrations:
.xlsx, .docx, .pptx.ods, .odt, .odp, .odgWith OnlyOffice we only have a limited number of licenses, so that in peak hours (about 11am) it can occur that not everyone can use OnlyOffice. In this case one can only wait and try again later.
Collabora is currently in testing stage and not limited by the number of licenses.
Currently editing files which have been received via federated shares does not reliably work in OnlyOffice. The devolopers are working on a solution.
Sciebo offers an integration of the collaborative LaTeX tool overleaf. This integration is based on the open source variant and its feature set is roughly between the free and basic tier of the commercial overleaf service.
We run our own overleaf instance, which can be used by all sciebo users.
The integration currently requires considerable development effort on our side and is provided as is.
In particular, we recommend to make regular backups of overleaf projects via the download function of overleaf projects, as we have only limited ability to restore singular projects.
In order to be able to share with a person, it first has to log into our overleaf instance via sciebo and create a new project.[^1]
If you receive a share, there is a notification in the project overview about
this.
This invitation can be accepted via “Join project” or be dismissed by a click
onto the cross.
Note that for sharing with persons from other universities, you do not need to use the federated id, but just their local username, which is everything before the second “@”. This feature can be used for guests at https://gast.sciebo.de also.
Currently, it is sadly impossible to directly interact with the sciebo storage,
but it is possible to use .zip archives both for importing and exporting
projects.
To import a project, you click on “New Project” and use the upload option:
To export/download a project, you click on the small cloud symbol in the
project overview:
$( 1 )$: To be honest we are not completely sure if it is necessary to really create a project beforehand. Logging in definitely is necessary though and when there is a project, we can be sure that a login happened.
Some things that one can do with sciebo will lead to the loss of data. This may not always be obvious.
You cannot use the sciebo-client and another cloud-client, such as Google Drive, dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive for the same folder.
Especially folders synchronized to Microsoft OneDrive may be a little hard to recognize.
You should not use the same folder with two different sciebo-clients. This may happen if for example a partition of your hard drive is used by two different operating systems.
The Sciebo client cannot be used with a Network-Drive. Errors in network traffic can quickly lead to the loss of data, and Errors in Network traffic occur more often than many people think.
It would be nice if this worked well. But data is transferred only at specific times, that are hard to control (or even see) by the user, and so it may happen that sciebo does not receive the data at all or only empty files.x
If the client throws up errors, it is often helpful if you can send logs to the support team in which the client perhaps provides a little more information about what exactly went wrong.
By default, the client does not collect any logs. In newer desktop clients, you can configure the logs by pressing the F12 key; this menu also shows where the logs are located, and you can open the corresponding folder.
| Action | Acoount-Type | Date |
|---|---|---|
| account block | regular | last login date + 12 months |
| account deletion | regular | date of account block + 6 months |
| account block | guest | last login date + 12 months |
| account deletion | guest | date of account block + 30 days |
| account block | project box | last login date + 24 months |
| account deletion | project box | date of account block + 6 months |
The desktop client has an auto-updater which should ensure that the latest version is always installed. However, in some cases this mechanism does not work, so that older version remain installed. Currently (November 2024), version 5.3.1 should be distributed. If you still have an older version, you should update the client manually by downloading and installing the new version from {< rawhtml >}www.sciebo.de{< /rawhtml >}.
Sporadically, there may be problems with the client signatures. If ‘apt update’ says something about ‘invalid signature’, it may be worth following the tips described in {< rawhtml >}this GitHub issue {< /rawhtml >}.
If the desktop client displays the following error message
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin “xcb” in “” even though it was found. This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialised. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.
It is possible that the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu is set. In this case, it may be
helpful to change the environment variable to: env LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/opt/ownCloud/qt-5.15.2/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/plugins/platforms" sciebo.
This is only partially a bug and is therefore difficult to fix. There are several reasons why a person cannot be found when sharing in sciebo:
We have not yet translated this page. For the german page, click here
Generally we differentiate between two types of accounts:
The situation for personal accounts is obvious: The data is owned by the person that owns the account.
When a person shares a file with you from their personal account, you will have access to this file temporarily, but you do not own it. If the person stops sharing their file with you or their account is deleted, access to the data is lost.
In this case we cannot recover your access to the file.
In project boxes the institution or the registered project owns the data. If the person who created the project box stops working for the project or institution, their collegues can talk to the support and take over the project box.
Regulation of the handling of business documents is governend by the participating institutes. There can be made no distinction between the personal space in sciebo and private storage devices. For files which are not allowed to be saved on private devices, but should be accessible in sciebo, project boxes can be used. A good description and attribution to the working group in the project box appliction can here help ease the support of certain issues in the future, e.g. when people leave the institute.
Projects often involve people who normally cannot use sciebo because they are not members of a participating institution. However, it is precisely here that a simple exchange of data is important. For this reason, there are guest IDs for these cases, which you as an employee can create yourself for your project partners.
Important: Guests must log in at gast.sciebo.de, because they are not a member of an organisation that is part of sciebo!
The guest’s e-mail address used for the invitation serves as the guest identifier. The sciebo web interface can be accessed by guests via gast.sciebo.de. Desktop client and apps can be used by guests for synchronisation. Guest IDs are valid for 12 months, renewal is possible. To do this, the guest must contact their sponsor, who can carry out the renewal via my.sciebo. After expiry, the guest ID is blocked and deleted after a further 3 months.
Guests can only use sciebo in a limited way, i.e. they do not have their own storage volume and cannot actively share data. To collaborate with guests, sciebo users must first share files and/or folders with them and give them the desired editing rights. Guests cannot create files or folders in their home directory, but only in folders shared with them. In this way, guests use the storage volume of the sciebo users who share with them.
Please note that it is not allowed to create guest IDs for members of the participant institutions.
Note: If the guest has already been invited by someone else, you will automatically become the new sponsor. In this case, the previous sponsor will also be notified.
In order to use your guest account, you must first set your password:
Log in to my.sciebo with your central user ID (not with your sciebo ID).
Select the menu item “Manage guests”. You will now see an overview of all guests you have invited.
You can perform the following actions here:
The prerequisite for sharing is that the guest has accepted your invitation and activated his or her account. The guest will only appear in the address book of the sharing dialogue the day after activation and only if he or she has not deactivated this feature.
You can find more information on the topic of sharing files and folders with sciebo here.
In this brief HOW-TO, we will take you through the steps of applying for a Project Box and setting it up so that you can actually work with the files stored in the Project Box using your private Sciebo account.
To request a project box, you must first submit the project box application in mysciebo. You will find the relevant field unter the heading Project boxes.
The form for the project box must be completed there; in the ‘Department/Workgroup’ field, please provide as precise a description as possible of the actual working group. Also enter the e-mail address of a person who can be contacted if you are unavailable in the “E-mail of Department/Workgroup” field. As the project box is not personalised, this makes it easier to reassign the data when you leave the university and the project box becomes orphaned.
Once this request has been accepted, you can access the project box management menu in mysciebo by clicking on ‘Manage project boxes’:
Here you need to set a password for the project box.
Now you can log in to your own Sciebo instance with this project box. For me, this is
https://uni-muenster.sciebo.de. Please note
the .pbox@institute at the end of the project box name, for example .pbox@uni-muenster.de for the University of Münster.
You can now set up a folder structure in the project box; it usually suffices to just have a folder, which you share with your personal Sciebo account:
You can set the permissions by clicking on the cogwheel next to the share. By default, everything is allowed; this makes sense for your personal account, as it enables you to share this project box folder with other project partners without having to log into the project box again.
End-to-end encryption enables sensitive data to be transferred via the cloud without an administrator or third party being able to view the contents of the files on the server. Encryption and decryption is carried out by a client on the end device (computer, cell phone, tablet). The advantage of Nextcloud end-to-end encryption (E2EE) is that one can also share the encrypted folders without having to share the own key.
Prerequisite: an E2EE app must be activated on the server, original Nextcloud client version 3+.
Server address: https://cryptnc.uni-muenster.de
Credentials: standard university login and password.
Check that the option “This account supports end-to-end encryption” is displayed in your client. Click on “Set-up encryption” to generate the encryption mnemonic.
Please save this phrase as you will need it to decrypt the files on other endpoints or to recover the files if the device is lost.
If you have already enabled encryption on the client, you can look up the mnemonic phrase by clicking ‘Show mnemonic’.
Notice: Keep a second copy of the files on your computer outside the nextcloud folder, this should also be where you edit the files. Use the encrypted folders to transfer files between different computers.
Try not to edit files inside the encrypted folder, as they may be irreversibly encrypted. There are methods to decrypt the files using the script provided by Nextcloud, but this method has not been tested yet, so we would rather advise you to do everything possible to avoid this risk.
Create the new folder. The folder must be empty to enable encryption. This is to prevent data loss. Any files placed in this folder will automatically be encrypted. The contents of this folder won’t be displayed in the web interface. On the server side, only the top level of files would be displayed in encrypted form. This way the admin won’t be able to see the data type. So, for example, if you put another folder in the encrypted folder, it would only be shown as a file, without any details about the files in it.
Activate the Nextcloud client and navigate to the Nextcloud folder on your computer.
Right-click on the folder you want to share. If the Nextcloud client is active, you should see Nextcloud in the menu.
Clicking on Nextcloud > Share options will open a window where you can add or remove shares for the chosen file or folder.
In the coming weeks, Sciebo will gradually migrate all instances of ownCloud to Nextcloud. Nothing will change in the basic functionality, only a few features will be added.
In fact, everything should continue to work as before. If not, this document will hopefully help.
If you’re having a more complicated case, feel free to email us as usual using our contact form.
We recommend every user to uninstall the old sciebo client and install the new Nextcloud based after the migration. Nevertheless, the old client is still working for the moment. The settings of the old client will be kept. See: Nextcloud clients
Alternatively, the unbranded Nextcloud client can be used for each platform, especially for mobile devices. A Nextcloud client for mobile devices can be found in the respective app stores (Play, FDroid and App Store).
Known issues: For compatibility reasons, the Nextcloud client does not synchronize files containing characters reserved by Windows in their name (“?”, “*”, “<”, “>”, “|”, “/”, “\” and “:”).
Make sure that any synchronization currently running in the previously used sciebo ownCloud client has been completed.
Open the previously installed sciebo ownCloud client and click on “User Account.” Now select the “Remove” option. Confirm the removal of the account. No data will be lost.
Now close the sciebo ownCloud client.
Uninstall the sciebo client you have been using from your system.
IMPORTANT: Treat the sciebo folder on your hard drive as a backup and rename it, e.g., to backup_sciebo.
Download the sciebo Nextcloud client for your operating system from the following page: https://hochschulcloud.nrw/de/download/index.html We recommend using a client without VFS.
Install the client. If a system restart is required, perform it.
Set up the new client by first selecting your instance. In the browser window, you will be asked to authorize with your sciebo ID.
Set up synchronization according to your preferences. Do NOT select the sciebo folder previously used on your hard drive. If you have selected this folder and receive an error message, go back to step 5 of these instructions.
Complete the setup wizard and leave the PC on until synchronization is complete. Do not disconnect the device from the Internet during this time.
You can synchronize data from the old Sciebo folder to the new folder using ROBOCOPY or rsync -av (depending on your operating system). These command line tools prevent newer data on the server from being overwritten by any older data on the client.
Enter the search term into the text field that has appeared:
IMPORTANT:
If the user that you are trying to share with is not part of your institution the search term has to have the following format: SCIEBO_USERNAME@institution.sciebo.de.
Else the sciebo-username is sufficient. The sciebo-username already looks like an e-mail, for example
mmustermann@uni-muenster.de. Thus to find Max Mustermann, who studies at the University of Münster, the following search term has to be entered:
mmustermann@uni-muenster.de@uni-muenster.sciebo.de.
If the Person that you are looking for is part of the same institution as yourself, the searchterm can be a lot less complicated, for example you can usually find such a person with the search-term family name, first name.
Select the user from the list
If the user does not appear during the search:
Because there are a lot of users in a lot of institutions, the autocompletion-function of the search-bar sometimes does not work well. Because of this it may happen that a user does not appear during a search. To solve this problem, write the search-term (for example mmustermann@uni-muenster.de@uni-muenster.sciebo.de) in a text-file, and copy-paste it into the search-bar.
Another reason that the person does not appear might be that the person that you are trying to find is not yet registered to sciebo - the user must have logged into sciebo at least once.
If you want to receive data from externals that is too big to be received by email, you can create a so-called file drop. You just have to create a public share and choose “Download / View / Upload” or “Download / View / Upload / Edit” as permission. Choose “Upload only (File Drop)” if users shouldn’t be allowed to see the content of the directory.
For internal use, a normal share between users can also be used and might be more appropriate.
To do this, create a folder, e.g. “filedrop”.
In the context menue on the right side, under the tab “Sharing” you can now
create a public link:
Here you can set the permissions, and also a password and expiry date.
The expiry date is soft, i.e. the share does not vanish at 00:00, but it usually takes a few hours until it is cleaned up.
If you often share data with the same group of people, you can create a group for this in the web interface. You no longer have to share data with each person individually, but can simply select the group you have created. All members of the group automatically get access to the data. You can set the editing rights as usual when sharing. Note, however, that groups can only consist of members of your own participant institution.
To manage your groups, you must log in to the web interface. Click on your name in the top menu bar, then on “Settings” and select “Custom groups”.
Renaming a Group
Removing a Group
To manage the members of one of your groups, you must log in to the web interface. Click on your name in the top menu bar, then on “Settings” and select “Custom groups”.
Adding Group Members
Changing Group Roles
Group members can be either “group owner” or “member”. Group owners have all editing options for the group (including deleting, renaming, adding/removing members). There can be more than one owner. Members, on the other hand, cannot make any changes to the group. By default, only the person who created the group is the group owner. If you want to change the roles, proceed as follows:
Removing Group Members
In principle, you can share with a group in the same way as with individual users. Follow the appropriate instructions depending on the platform (web interface, client or app) via which you want to share. You only need to note the following differences:
When you share a folder or a folder is shared with you, that contains a lot of subfolders, it is often annoying to navigate through the entire structure or to explain to others how to get to a specific file. You can create a link that leads to a specific folder that has been shared. This only works if the folder that you shared is located in your root directory! The link has the following form:
https://<institution of the person that you are sharing with>.sciebo.de/?dir=/<Path>/<to>/<the>/<directory>/
You can use the following tool to generate a link to a shared directory.
You have received a link to this page.
| Your Institution : |
Project boxes are special sciebo accounts for work groups that work with very large amounts of data (30 GB to 2 TB). They are particularly suitable for long-term projects with changing project management. Project boxes are not bound to individual persons, i.e. the role of the owner is transferable. Project boxes are managed in the owner’s my.sciebo section.
Click here for “HOW TO: Create and Manage Project Boxes”
The institutions listed below provide project boxes. Unless otherwise noted, all employees with a sciebo account can apply for one.
Application via my.sciebo
Application to the IT Centre
Special Form
The application should contain the following information:
For all applications, the support of the institution decides on an approval. Once the application has been approved, you will be notified by e-mail.
In order to use the project box, you must first set the password:
Direct access to the project box is only necessary for assigning access rights to the central project folder (using shares) and managing the associated editing rights:
In the web interface, you can make additional settings to protect access to your sciebo account.
Two-factor authentication is a feature that increases security when accessing the sciebo web interface. When logging in, you must enter a 6-digit number in addition to the sciebo password, which you receive anew for each login via a 2-factor app.
Notes:
App passwords are 16-digit security codes that allow a device to access your sciebo account. They are valid only once and are entered instead of the sciebo password when logging in. The use of app passwords is only useful in exceptional cases, for example if the sciebo password would be stored in plain text on your end device.
We have not yet translated this page. Click here for the german documentation.