Question: I have a small owncloud server on Raspbian and owncloud stores all data on an external hdd drive wich is connected to the raspbeerry pi. Right now I would like to upload all my movies, music etc. to my owncloud, but as one could expect this takes ages (approx. 150GB). Would it be possible to shut down the raspberry and plug the drive directly into my desktop and write the files to the correct directories? Or would this result in errors regarding reading,writing permissions or anything else?

Thanks!

Answer: 
I would say its perfectly possible to do this.

I use my external hard drive for torrents and whenever I need to transfer unfinished torrents from pc to laptop I directly transfer by removing the hard disk.Never had a problem.

Hope it helps.
**Yes this is possible** as SteveIrwin says. 

I'd just like to add that after you have manually copied your files into the data directory, you'll need to **change the owner and group** to the appropriate user running your server instance. For example, I'm running my ownCloud on an Apache server under the "www-data" user and group, so I do:

```
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data "myfoldername"

```

**to allow ownCloud to recognise the folder, subfolders and files** and be able to edit them.

In order **to find your Apache user**, run:

```
ps axo user,group,comm | grep apache2

```

which should give you an output like:

```
root     root     apache2
www-data www-data apache2
www-data www-data apache2
www-data www-data apache2
www-data www-data apache2
www-data www-data apache2
www-data www-data apache2
www-data www-data apache2
www-data www-data apache2
www-data www-data apache2
www-data www-data apache2

```

with the **user in the first column** (www-data) and the **group in the second column** (www-data).