Organization / tenant backup

Feature Request
1

Hello folks !

Is there a way, with an admin account, to access every share within an organization ?

We are looking to offer an automated backup service on our Seafile Professionnal platform (like we do with Microsoft 365 using tenant access :zipper_mouth_face:).

This is, I think, absolutely essential for the professionnal market.

I know there is a trash system, but a trash is not a backup :wink:

Thanks for your answers.

2

In Seafile, administrators do not have direct access to view or browse all users’ files through the web interface (Seahub) by default, primarily for privacy and security reasons.

However, for your goal of creating an automated backup service, there are two primary ways to handle this:

1. System-wide Backup (Recommended)

If you want to back up the entire platform (all organizations and users), the standard procedure is to back up the databases and the data directory (where the blocks are stored). This is the most efficient way to ensure you can recover the entire system or individual libraries if needed.

2. File-level Access via seaf-fuse

If your backup service needs to access individual files directly on the server (e.g., to copy them to an external storage as plain files), you can use the FUSE extension.

  • seaf-fuse mounts all Seafile libraries as a read-only virtual filesystem on the server.
  • Once mounted, an admin can browse a directory structure like /mount-point/user@example.com/Library-Name/file.txt.
  • Note: Encrypted libraries cannot be accessed this way as the server does not store the passwords.
  • Documentation: FUSE extension

For a professional backup service, seaf-fuse is usually the tool of choice if you need to perform file-level operations across the entire tenant.

1 Like
3

Hi Daniel,

Thanks you for this thorough answer.

The system wide backup is not what we are looking for, but seaf-fuse might be the solution.

We will definitely look into it !