Hunting for Nextcloud Cloud Storage Forensic Artifacts on Endpoints

This report provides a practical walkthrough of Nextcloud forensics on Windows, identifying key artifact locations such as `C:\Users%username%\Nextcloud` (with a hidden `._sync_<unique_id>.db` SQLite metadata database) and `C:\Users%username%\AppData\Roaming\Nextcloud` (containing `nextcloud.cfg`, `Nextcloud_sync.log`, and `sync-exclude.lst`). It explains useful metadata and log fields (e.g., path, inode, modtime, filesize, contentChecksum/SHA1, etag, direction, instruction) and demonstrates querying and recovering deleted records from SQLite free space, while recommending tools like DB Browser for SQLite and KAPE for collection and parsing.