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The original was posted on /r/nextcloud by /u/elsebel- on 2025-10-11 20:14:27+00:00.

Edit / clarification: Some people in the previous thread suggested hiring a developer or that we’re making money from Nextcloud and should fix it ourselves. That’s not the case. We didn’t introduce Nextcloud to our clients and we don’t sell it. They were already using it and simply asked us to handle the administration since we manage their infrastructure anyway. We don’t earn anything from it directly, and we’re not interested in building or maintaining custom code. We just reported this because it’s a real limitation that affects many admins who run shared setups.

We’re running several Nextcloud setups for clients, all hosted on Hetzner. The system itself works fine, but one thing keeps coming up again and again: permissions.

If you take away the delete right from a user, that person also can’t rename, move or copy files or folders. It doesn’t matter if it’s a shared folder or a group folder – same behavior everywhere.

I opened a thread in the Nextcloud community and a feature request on GitHub. The typical answer was something like:

And yes, I get the technical side. Rename and move are treated as delete + recreate. That’s how file systems work. But that’s not the point here. This isn’t about what Linux allows. It’s about what users expect in a collaboration platform.

In real life, rename, move and copy are just organizational actions. They’re not destructive. People don’t think about inodes. They just want to keep structure without risking data loss.

Nextcloud already abstracts the filesystem in many other ways. It’s not a raw file browser anymore. It’s a collaboration platform. So it should handle this too.

If Nextcloud wants to stay usable for teams, it needs a permission model that reflects how people actually work:

• ⁠read • ⁠write / create • ⁠rename • ⁠move • ⁠copy • ⁠delete • ⁠share

Right now you have to choose between two bad options: either give people delete rights and hope they don’t break something, or take them away and block every bit of organization in the process.

ACLs don’t fix it either. If delete is denied at folder level, you can’t override that deeper down.

I understand the logic behind the current setup, but it doesn’t match how real users work. Other systems like SharePoint, Seafile, FileCloud, even NTFS shares, can separate rename and delete. So it’s definitely possible.

We’re still using Nextcloud, but this one limitation shows up in every new project. If anyone has a proper workaround, plugin or config trick, I’d love to hear it.

TL;DR: Removing delete also blocks rename, move and copy. Developers say “that’s how filesystems work”, but that doesn’t help real users. Looking for a clean workaround or info if this will be fixed at some point.