Hello everybody,
I don’t want to break up with Nextcloud because the synchronization on the client always has errors.
In Nextcloud I integrated the directory in Nextcloud with SMB or homedirectoy from Lunux Serve, there are also links in these directories.
I want to include the Linux users’ home directories in Seafile, how can I do that?
Ubuntu 18.04, Seafile 7.1.5
Thank you
Philip
Hi haederli,
congratulations to the decision to switch to Seafile. You’ll see, the Seafile sync is unparallaled.
The switch is not entirely effortless though. You cannot just “mount” your SMB/home directory into Seafile. You need to upload your data into Seafile using the sync client. Reason being that Seafile uses block storage (as opposed to file storage used by ownCloud/NextCloud). Seafile chops a file into chunks and stores them as such in the backend. (This is a feat!! It allows delta sync and deduplication.)
You can upload the data either via the desktop client or the terminal client. You find both on the download page.
Thank you for your help
I read that with the sync.
but I want the data from the home directory to always be in seafile. Because I access the data from Windows and Linux when I’m at home.
If that is not possible, I will unfortunately have to stay with Nextcloud.
Pity !
You could just add a symbolic link of your home directory into a seafile library. Seafile does not ignore symbolic links. Be careful not to have your seafile directory inside your home folder, as it will cause a loop (seafile directory inside home directory -> home directory linked inside seafile directory), this is the main reason sync of symbolic links is disabled in most sync software.
Usually on linux systems there’s a .cache directory inside home directories, you will most likely not want to sync this, add an exception with seafile-ignore.txt, as it will waste space on the server unless you disable library history and run garbage collection frequently. Do this for each cache and temp directory inside the home directory. The reason those files are still on the server (and why seafile’s sync algorithm is miles ahead of nextcloud’s) has to do with seafile’s architecture being based on content tracking, git implements a conceptually similar but more simpler system as it’s designed to handle text files, each library being analogous to a repository in git terms.
Do you know the SeaDrive client? It maps all your Seafile library’s to your local file system. You can access the data just like you would with a network share, but unlike network drives SeaDrive offers offline caching and some other nice treats. The offline cache can sit in your home directory. Is that what you mean?
good idea,
to link the data from Seafile to the home directory.
Question where does seafile store the library data
You decide that when establishing the sync, individually for every library.
I want to link the library to my Linux home.
But I can only do that if I have a directory name.
ln -s seafile-library /data/home/philip/Data/seafli-data
thanks
Internal library data (latest version on the sever, file system index, etc) is all stored in seafile-data under the default library directory.
ccnet data is stored in the user home directory under “ccnet”, I don’t think this can be changed, so create an exception for it in seafile-ignore.txt.
Oh yes, nice discussion but in fact the question:
I want to include the Linux users’ home directories in Seafile, how can I do that?
is not really answered.
So - how, exactly can I do that?
I assume that I have to do this as root from the commandline getting in trouble with the user credentials as the users shall be able to manage their data…
Again, not an easy task and it remains unanswered. When I try it as user I can, of course, not create a dir outside my own ~/
So I think this is really a BUG in seafile. Someone did not think it down to the end of the process.
Do you mean you want to include the home dirs of seafile linux server’s users in seafile data (on the same machine)?
The idea ist to add a user with linux adduser and to configure his /home/userdir to be automagically synched with an seafile server and to enable him to manage his account at this seafile server himself.
It’s not that I don’t want to answer (I can’t, to be honest), but to me it smells like you have a bad approach or the wrong tool. Hard to elaborate since I don’t understand your use case, but I’m quite confident there’s better solutions than synching the whole home folder on Seafile. 
