This confused me at first with Nextcloud also. What I think OP means is that by default the Nextcloud stores the files shared in a database, not the server’s local filesystem. My first question when I setup Nextcloud was literally, "Ok, now that I’ve set things up and got the mobile app accessing it, how the heck to I access those files when I ssh into the server running Nextcloud. You can share directories from the server’s filesystem with Nextcloud. But it’s not obvious at first how to do that, especially if you’re running Nextcloud from a docker container. If you’re used to the way Dropbox works and (almost) the way OneDrive works, this distinction can be confusing and frustrating. It still frustrates me, because it complicates access control over those files and I practically never have a need for the files stored in Nextcloud’s default places. I’m not sharing the Nextcloud instance or the server with anyone else and I want to access files from the CLI always, so I don’t have any use for Nextcloud’s defaults.