Seafile Mirror

A Python tool to handle clean read-only (re-)syncs of Seafile libraries with the intention to mirror them.

Overview

If you have Seafile libraries, you may want to back them up in a safe place automatically.

One option is to snapshot/backup the whole server on which the library is stored. However, in some situations, this may not be feasible or even not possible.

This is why this repository offers a different way: you can define one or multiple Seafile libraries that shall be downloaded to a local directory. These libraries can belong to the same or a different user, and even on different Seafile servers!

Features

• Download/sync defined libraries in customisable intervals
• De-sync libaries immediately after they have been downloaded to avoid sync errors
• Allow to force-re-sync a library even if its re-sync interval hasn't reached yet
• Extensive informative and error logging
• Created with automation in mind so you can run it in cronjobs or systemd triggers
• Deal with the numerous caveats of seaf-cli and Seafile in general

Install

The tool depends on the following applications:

• Python 3
• poetry (e.g. by pip3 install poetry)
• seafile-cli, available e.g. in Debian

You can execute the tool with poetry run seafile-mirror. The --help flag informs you about the required and available commands.

There is also an Ansible role that takes care of installing the tool, setting up a systemd service, and running it daily.

To keep the Seafile daemon that is required for seafile-cli running in the background, check out this exemplary systemd service.

Configuration

Configuration is done in a YAML file called seafile_mirror.conf.yaml. You can find an example here.

If that configuration file resides in the same location your current working directory, you should provide --configdir ./.

Logging and caching

The tool creates seafile_mirror.log in addition to the log to the standard output in the configuration directory. With -v you can print DEBUG messages that will help you in case of problems.

It also caches the current status of synced libraries and their latest full download in the file .seafile_mirror.db.json. Do not delete this file unless you don't mind that the tool will re-sync all libraries in the next run.