seaDRIVE root folder path includes username. Can it be changed?

[Johnny]

Hi Jonathan,

I’m having the same problem as John, with my team.

I’ve tested symlink, subst and net use.
But they all have big caveats.

• symlink and subst are not respected by all programs.
  Git for example will break through the symlink to the real path.
• And net use or mapping the folder as a network drive adds a heavy performance penalty.

I’ve written a detailed post about the issue.

@Johnny

Custom SeaDrive root possible?

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What I mean by custom root is the ability to customize the root drive and folder SeaDrive uses.

For example my current path on Windows looks like this:

S:\seafile\John\My Libraries\…

At the moment I only have control over a limited part of that path.
I can choose the drive letter.
I can/have to choose the root folder - seafile.
I can choose my name - I guess.
I can’t change the “main” library containers - “My Libraries”, “Shared with all”, etc.

Now I generally don’t like paths being “forced” on me, but in this case it creates some real problems.

Here’s a non exhaustive list of problems:

• First and foremost there is a whitespace in the path - My😟Libraries.
  This can result in many hard to debug problems when using those paths in certain software.
  Like Python, Rust, Blender and Nuke, just to name a few.

• My name is part of the root. In my case that’s not that big of an issue. But I do have a special character in my last name. Having special characters like ö,ä,ü,etc. will almost certainly lead to problems.

• The path I get will always be different to the path someone has who I’ve shared something with. That’s a recipe for long nights of debugging. Why is it working for me, but not for them?

And here are some workarounds I’ve tried:

• Using Mountain Duck and WebDAV to see if I can choose a mount point.
  I stopped trying as sync performance via the WebDAV protocol is terrible.

• Using the subst command in Windows to mount a folder to a drive letter.
  This works for some applications, but breaks Git and VSCode.
  Unfortunately Git seems to break through the substitution and uses the real path.

• Using the net use command in Windows to mount a folder as a Network Drive.
  Again this works for some applications, but unfortunately has a big performance hit.
  Especially the VSCode intelesense server seems to struggle a lot.

So now at the end of a long “workaround” day I would like to ask the big question:
Is there a way to change the root path? And if not - Is that something to implement?

Here are some ideas how to implement, going from “basic” to "ideal. imho.

1. Remove the user name. Let each user choose a directory where their files should live.
   And allow the admin to predefine the exact names for the four main library containers.
   The names change already based on the language setting. So changing them manually shouldn’t be to hard?
   Result → S:\seafile\custom_name\my_library\…

2. Remove the user name and mount the four main library containers directly to a drive letter.
   Same as before - allow the admin to define the names for the four main container folders.
   Result → X:\my_library\…

3. My ideal solution: Allow the user to mount one of the four main folders or any library directly to a drive letter. This would be ideal as regardless what kind of library it is, my own, one shared with me, or a global one, I can control the entire path.
   Result → X:\…

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Thats it. Thank you for reading. And I hope you’ll consider my points.
I just switched from Nextcloud and am very happy. Just this one thing and its “perfect”.

Cheers J

It would make a huge difference and resolve all the hacky workarounds if we could define the root path ourselves. I would love to see some form of customization implemented.

Cheers J