Seafile client puts the moved files back

Hi,

We have started using Seafile recently. It seems to be a great addition to our pipeline but we discovered that one of the desktop client apps keeps moved files copying back to their previous originating folders while creating conflicts.

Here how it seems to happen

Server Ubuntu
Client-A (Windows 10, Ntfs, SSD)
Client-B (OSX, exFat drive, SSD)

  • Client-A modifes and moves some files ( files-A ) from folder-A to another folder ( folder-Z )
    while Client-B is offline (at night)

  • When Client-B gets connected in the morning it “copies” files-A from folder-Z and puts them back to folder-A Therefor not just the files are restored now we have extra copies of the same files.

And also it creates conflicts for the files that have changed while “Client-B” is offline.

We are interested in using the commercial version however this does not seem to be an option for us given that this is very unreliable situation since we cant keep track of these things mentally. And this is quite distruptive to our work plus being dangerous.

1 Like

Hi blenderist, welcome to the Seafile Community Forum!
First of, glad to hear that you like Seafile! Believe me, Seafile is, when setup and configured properly, a super reliable solution.
To your issue: I am pretty sure that your problem is Client-B’s exFAT file system. We encountered a similar issue earlier this year with a client of ours. The client with the exFAT hard drive was involved in every problem. When we disabled the device, the problems stopped. When reformatting the hard drive with another file format (I think NTFS), the problems didn’t reoccur. Hence, we did not positively prove that the exFAT was the culprit, but by way of exclusion we had very good evidence.

If it is not the file system, other usual suspects are

  • wrong time/time zone on the client
  • antivirus software
  • backup software

Hence, on top of what I said about the file system, please check the time/time zone on Client-B. Given that Client-B is macOS, I suppose you don’t use AV. If you do, please disable for further tests. Re backup software: Time Machine is not known to cause problems, but we have seen real-time backup software that used the same notification mechanism as the Seafile client causing conflicts as a result.
Let me know if these tipps help you solve the problem!

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. We changed the filesystem to NTFS and it seemed to work for couple days without issues (like restoring deleted files without any indication) and then suddenly it started pouring moved and deleted files back into our repository again.

At this point we think that either the Mac client is really borked or we are hitting a corner case.

Does client B have any changed files to the moved files that haven’t been uploaded to the server? If so, the client will try to retain the changed files to prevent file lost.

If client A didn’t see the changes made by client B when it uploads its change to the server, client B will create conflict files. This is a normal behavior.

Hi

The thing is ClientB user never changes/moves/deletes any files in those folders and all the files that are reversed back by this ClientB should have never touched or modified by ClientB. This is not a normal behavior.

ClientB is almost like an idle backup client. So any idea that ClientB (Osx) does some changes and those changes are propagated back to the server naturally is an impossibility in our use case.

Basically ClientB puts the state of the server back (while also creating conflicts) to the night before it goes offline state by “merging” (the files that are changed by ClientA after ClientB going offline will be merged with the ClientB’s state in the morning by it) and that is a big problem in our pipeline.

It requires no further explanation that the observed behavior is a big problem in production.

This said: I can reassure you that the macOS client is not broken. There must be another problem.

So one step at a time:

  • Do you experience any problems on the Windows machine? How many Windows machines do you run?
  • Did you do all the other things that I advised you to do? AV software, backup software, time/time zone? (Please check time zone on Windows, Ubuntu server and macOS client!!)
  • Do you use the latest client and server software (OS, client, Seafile server)?
1 Like

Hi

I realize that this is a very hard situation to debug or resolve by the developers. Basically I am trying to find some clues on what might be causing this misbehavior.

Do you experience any problems on the Windows machine? How many Windows machines do you run?

I do not have any issues with the Windows clients (it seems) and there is only one Win client at the moment.

Did you do all the other things that I advised you to do? AV software, backup software, time/time zone? (Please check time zone on Windows, Ubuntu server and macOS client!!)

All time zones are correct except the server has been at “etc/UTC” (which was the deffault value for the Docker image)

Do you use the latest client and server software (OS, client, Seafile server)?

We seem to be using the latest versions of those.

This maybe your problem: Folders with white spaces keep coming back by windows client

Hi

I do not think so. So far the ones I was able to track down are inside folders without spaces in their names. The files themselves do not have spaces in their names either. Plus all those folders were created by the Windows client user.

They might be hitting a similar issue but happens to be with folders with spaces. And it seems like the roles by the platform clients are reversed in this case.

I just had to clean up those restores again last night. This seems to be a recurring issue for us.

Are there possible any characters in there that NTFS does not like? < > ” : / \ ? | *; periods at the end of a folder name, …

Not sure how to help you from here…

For lack of a better idea: Have you already tried starting over again? Log out, remove account credentials, log back in, create new sync points, see what happens?

Are there possible any characters in there that NTFS does not like? < > ” : / \ ? | *; periods at the end of a folder name, …

The characters in the file names are regular alphanumerics stuff.

For lack of a better idea: Have you already tried starting over again? Log out, remove account credentials, log back in

We tried that as well.

Can you send your Mac client’s seafile.log to me by PM? You mentioned that the files are stored in an exFAT drive. So there may be connection issues between the drive and computer.