With apologies in advance if this is a dumb question. I’m very new to Seafile and was looking through the manual on how it works and ran across page on Seafile FSCK (sorry apparently I can’t include links in this post). The part that caught my attention was this part:
On the server side, Seafile stores the files in the libraries in an internal format. Seafile has its own representation of directories and files (similar to Git).
With default installation, these internal objects are stored in the server’s file system directly (such as Ext4, NTFS). But most file systems don’t assure the integrity of file contents after a hard shutdown or system crash. So if new Seafile internal objects are being written when the system crashes, they can be corrupt after the system reboots. This will make part of the corresponding library not accessible.
Given the above, I was wondering if it’s possible to make changes and/or have other applications write directly to the the Seafile data directory, or if that will have any adverse consequences, such as corrupting the Seafile library or files not showing up in Seafile. For example, I had been planning on designating an existing directory of documents currently being shared via Samba as a Seafile data directory and wanted to continue to allow documents to be added, removed, etc. through Samba. Would that be problematic? Would Seafile change any of the existing permissions on the files?
On a somewhat related note, can I designate the existing directory of documents to be the Seafile data directory? Wasn’t sure if, for example, Seafile wipes the designated directory or does something else given the above. Or would the better approach be to only import the existing directory later using seaf-import.sh (as describe in the manual - sorry looks like I can’t include links).
Any thoughts or suggestions would be most appreciated.