Okay so we wanted to restructure our seafile libraries as they were a mess. Each department was in charge of creating a new file structure for their departments files by creating a new file in the library. e.g ‘_Sales_New_Structure’
creating new folders within that folder and then moving files from the old folder to the new one.
But seafile has been having a nightmare and is deleting files from folders, restoring moved folders by itself back to their old location and god knows what else.
We have a folder called image bank that was 56GB.
we have moved nearly all the pictures to the new library and that new library is only 1GB in size… WTF!!!
WHERE ARE OUR 55GB OF DAta GONE?
there were thousands of files that have been replaced, removed, renamed or just disappeared. its giving our team a real hard time. I’ve NEVER seen a file server do as much crazy stuff as Seafile has done. Its deleting files on behalf of people constantly.
Please, an admin needs to help me as this is causing a nightmare for our company
I am getting quite nervous. This about the 5th person I have seen in here saying that Seafile has been randomly deleting files in a short time frame. Multiple people experiencing the same thing in a small time frame points to a problem not being caused by the user, but a possible bug in the software.
Sure hope this can get figured out before I start seeing the issue too!
Ha… if you only saw our trash / history… I dont even know where to start. they have been mixed in with other users doing their daily stuff so im scared that restoring a snapshot will cause issues else where.
I had a problem a week or so ago where one users seaflie client was mass deleting files off of seafile and restoring files to older versions…:
Tjhis was just one instance of this account mass deleting, moving, restoring files. his account did this about 6 times before I deleted his account completely…
Now we are having issues where files are just disappearing themself. folders are being renamed themself. Files that were moved, are being moved back to their original location by themself…
Hours of work is being reverted without human intervention and i dont know why!!!
Yes, we had a library with 56GB of data, we copied all that data to a new folder when doing our company library restructure.
The new library, after weeks of work moving files beteen the two libaries is only 1GB in size. so I dont know whats happened to the other 55GB of data that we copied over to the new folder…
Can you post the library history page of the problematic library? The history will show which client caused a modification.
On the other hand, I suggest you to create a new library when doing massive re-structure to avoid a wrong behaving client to restore files back, for example, a file can’t be moved from the old place to new place in that client.
In theory this can’t happen. If you are using a new library and no one else are syncing that library, why the files are removed from that library. If some clients accidentally connected to that library, you can find which client do the modification in the library history. If some of your users syncing the new library with the old local folder in their computer, this will cause problems.
So, please make sure you fully analyzed the problem before posting a title with “Seafile has totally destroyed our company file structure”! Otherwise, we can’t help with the problem.
I’m in agreement with @daniel.pan. I’ve had this exact same problem with Dropbox and Google Drive in the past. Multiple sync clients and trying to move files around while all of them were trying to sync real-time caused me to lose a lot of files.
I won’t even detail the disaster I created when I decided to sync files from one folder to a Dropbox folder with a third party file syncing program. That’s one of the reasons I moved to Seafile from GD and DP… So that I could create multiple sync folders other than just the GD or DP folder.
Only one user was working in the library in question yesterday. I personally helped her recover some missing files by restoring certain snapshots. An hour or so later, those files were deleted again. Also, some files she had created had been delted also, as if seafile went back in time to before we made any changes.
I suggest you to create a new library when doing massive re-structure to avoid a wrong behaving client to restore files back
I had actually thought that they were doing the restructre offline, with the intention to upload the new library when its ready, but that wasnt the case. I ended up trying to do this (Creating a new library to separate their restructure from the rest of the daily work) but the new restructred library was only 1 GB in size. the library they are restructuring is 56GB in size (they had moved around 80% of the files to the new structure) so I dont know whats happened to the other 55GB of data they were moving around. I had the move the new library back into the original folder as it was causing too much confusion.
The thing is that the library they are working on is not heavily used by people. its just an image repository to store our company pictures. its only used by a handful of people at specific times so its like not there is a constant read/write to the library. Well, tjhere is now because were moving files around, but thats all we’re dooing in that library
Also, the screenshots I posted in my original post were not a result of the restructure. That was from a completely different library nor was the user at his desk when this was going on.
Its just weird that Seafile starts mass deleteing files from libraries by its own accord, and now one of our seafile libraries starts to delete itself around the same time. Hence the title.
I mean… just look at the number of files from that one time period. There was another 3 screenshots of files that I didnt upload because…well…im sure you got the point after 4 pages of info. There were another 5 or more incidents like that from just this one user.
This all happened the day I upgraded a user to 6.1.7. Not sure if that’sa coincidence or not.
Let’s focus on the new library. From your description, you have only one user using the local folder to sync with the library in the server. The user copy files from old local folder to the new local folder. Can you check how many files in the local folder and how many files in the server? Can you also share the screenshot of the library history page?
There is one step I did differently than previously when setting up this user on Seafile;
We have local login accounts on our machines. A user had left our company and a new employee took over his role. Before getting him up and running on seafile, I moved the existing Seafile library from the ex employees ~/users//Seafile folder into the ~/users/shared folder so that I didnt need to delete the library only to just re-download them all again. I tried this as I thought it would be quicker to put it in a shared folder than private user folders (save time on re-dnwloading folders)
Then I downloaded the latest(at the time) version of Seafile on is machine, 6.1.7. I synced the libries, but instead of creating a new folder, I chose to sync to an existing folder and pointed to the library in the shared folder. Seafile apparently decide to just revert everything back to whatever version was left in the shared folder, it seems, rather than use the servers version or something?
Can you check the library screenshot page to see which client and version did the modification? most, if not all of these changes have come from one new user.
Yes, most, if not all changes that I am aware of came from one user, across a few different verions.
I can show you(all the images below came from the same user:
