I’m new here, and I’m really excited to learn more about Seafile and how it can help manage and sync my files. I’ve been using a few cloud storage services but have heard great things about Seafile, especially for its speed and security features. I’m looking for advice on getting started, particularly around setting up a self-hosted version and ensuring data integrity.
I’m also curious about how Seafile handles file versioning and syncing between different devices. Are there any best practices for keeping everything organized and backed up properly? I’ve seen some positive reviews about its performance, and I’m eager to dive deeper into its capabilities.
I’d love to hear from other users who have been using Seafile for a while and any tips or advice you might have. Thanks in advance for your help, and I look forward to being a part of this community!
If you think you might want to self-host other programs in the future, drop the caddy that seafile tries to get you to install and set up your own reverse proxy (nginx or something). It’s a bit harder to set up now, but makes it easier to add things later.
Not just for seafile, but for anything self-hosted, set up to only be accessible from your local network for now. Later when you are more comfortable with it, you can add a VPN so you can access seafile when away. Don’t make it public unless you actually need to. Isolation is the easiest and most effective security.
Install in a VM if you can. Being able to make a snapshot before doing things that might break it (installing updates, etc.) is great. Also being in a VM means you can just backup the entire VM the same as your other VMs so you don’t have a special backup process just for seafile.
Store that VM in a ZFS raid, or other storage with redundancy and error checking (ceph is another good one if you have a cluster of servers). This is great for data integrity. I recommend proxmox for VMs if you don’t already have a VM hosting server.
For the question on versioning and syncing between devices, this can get pretty complicated, but the simple answer is that if you manage to modify the same file at the same time in two places, both versions are kept, but one is renamed so you will have “test_file.txt” and “test_file.txt (SFConflict username@yourserver.com 2025-04-08-15-38)”. You can compare the files manually to fix it, but honestly it rarely comes up. The time window between a change being saved, and it being synced to other clients is pretty small. If you are sharing files with a team it can happen a little more often, but when it is just you editing on different machines it doesn’t happen much.
And the final bit of advice, hang around this forum. Every week or whatever at least skim the quiestions people are asking (and answer if you can). I know I am not the only person who has chosen to “give back” to this project that has been great for me by trying to help others here. It’s a bit rare these days to find a space as helpful (and spam free) as this forum.