You need to provide the path to the data directory on your filesystem and not an URL. The data directory should be outside the directory that's accessible via internet anyway.

Hi iionly, can you provide an example? :-)

You should know best where you created the data directory on your server. Let's say you have a situation where your home directory / the webspace directory is "/home/user_x/". Then you might have a directory "/home/user_x/public_html" (or maybe "/home/user_x/www" where you copied the Elgg files into. This would be the Elgg root directory or domain root directory in general. When entering "http://yoursite.url" in your browser you would access the stuff in "/home/user_x/public_html".

The data directory for Elgg should then be outside "/home/user_x/public_html". For example you can create the directory "/home/user_x/elgg_data". When installing Elgg you would then need to provide "/home/user_x/elgg_data/" when asked for the data directory.

Should be no sweat. Just above where it asks for path to data it will show the path to the site. Just copy/paste and change the end filename. I think

iionly: That was most helpful. We actually had to dig around our Hosting administration panel to find something called "Server Information" and found something like this:

Document Root /home/users/web/b99995/as.mywebsite/public_html

And we pointed it to the data folder and it worked perfectly!

Thank you so much iionly! :D

Did you point the document root in the server admin panel to the location of your data folder? If yes, I'm not sure that was right. I would rather say that was wrong...

The document root is the directory on your server where your site domain has its root. When calling http://yourdomain.url in your browser the document root (directory) is accessed.

When installing Elgg you need to provide three things:

• your site URL (that's what you enter in your browser to access your site),
• the Elgg root directory: this is the directory where the Elgg files are copied to on the server, for example /home/users/web/b99995/as.mywebsite/public_html. This could be the document root or a subdirectory of the document root. In case of document root (/home/users/web/b99995/as.mywebsite/public_html) you would access your site with http://yourdomain.url. In case of a subdirectory (e.g. /home/users/web/b99995/as.mywebsite/public_html/elgg) you would access your site with http://yourdomain.url/elgg.
• the data directory for Elgg: this is where for example profile pics, uploaded files etc. are stored. This should NOT be in the document root or any subfolder of it because this data would then be accessible directly from the internet without any access restrictions. Therefore you should create the data directory for example as /home/users/web/b99995/as.mywebsite/data. And this is the path you need to provide at installing Elgg then.

The data folder is aloways outside of elgg directory.