Best practice - recover files to backed up laptop

Trying to figure best way to recover a laptop which has the Agent installed and is backing up to a Seafile server.

We recently had a laptop user’s hard drive crash. We restored our standard image on the laptop and I thought it would be a simple task to restore her files from Seafile server. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a simple way to do this.

I tested out by installing the agent on her clean laptop and re-syncing with Seafile server (using a test user account). Unfortunately when I did this the agent wiped out the data on the server and left the synced folder blank (as the laptop had an empty folder on the C: drive).

I next logged into the web portal as the user and found I was able to use the Share link and Download her files from the server. Unfortunately this needed to be done file by file and took hours to complete.

I am thinking there must be a simple way to recover all of a users files from the Seafile server without resorting to all of this manual processing. I did try searching the forums but cannot find anything clearly documented. What is best practice for recovering files to a crashed PC?

Thanks in advance…

I tested out by installing the agent on her clean laptop and re-syncing with Seafile server (using a test user account). Unfortunately when I did this the agent wiped out the data on the server and left the synced folder blank (as the laptop had an empty folder on the C: drive).

This should not have happened.

Are you able to replicate this with another test user account? Create a new account on the Seafile server, put some data in it, then add that account to another laptop and see what happens.

I next logged into the web portal as the user and found I was able to use the Share link and Download her files from the server. Unfortunately this needed to be done file by file and took hours to complete.

Next time go to the web UI, go into the library that you want to restore files, click on the history button, select the snapshot before the deletion happened, then click “Restore”.

I am thinking there must be a simple way to recover all of a users files from the Seafile server without resorting to all of this manual processing. I did try searching the forums but cannot find anything clearly documented. What is best practice for recovering files to a crashed PC?

The server-side copy should never have been deleted because an empty client was attached to the account. Something terrible occurred.

Interesting. I tested on another PC and it seemed to work much better for me. I installed the agent, sync’d some files/folders. Installed Seafile on another PC and logged in as the same user. I was then prompted where I wanted to sync the libraries too and when I browsed to Documents and Desktop, all of my files were copied to the new PC.

That is exactly what I wanted to happen and I’m thankful it now appears to be working. I will complete some additional testing to validate this.

As for accessing files on the Web UI, I log in as the user and see my Desktop and Documents folders within libraries. I don’t see a History link though. If I hover over the folder name I get icons for Share, Delete and More Options…again, nothing for History. I did notice I can select all items in my Desktop folder but when I click the Download link I get a message stating “Total Size Exceeds Limits”.

For now it looks like I am good with the agent sync, but it would be nice to be able to download files via the WebUI as well.

Thanks for your help on this!

You don’t have this icon at the top right?

From the main library screen I do not see that icon. If I click on the folder itself (ie, Desktop) I see all of the individual files and sub-folders. On that screen I see the clock icon. When I click on it I am taken to a Modification History screen and it shows each file as it is updated on my PC (and then sync’d). There is a View Snapshot option listed for each file and an option to restore. Does this restore the one file or all of the files that are part of that snapshot? If it does restore them, where does this restore to?

Thanks

It will restore all contents of that library back to that snapshot to the original location.

If you want only individual files to be restored to a specific time period and not the whole library, go to the history for that individual file and click restore.