I wrote this post before I moved away from Seafile. I won’t be updating it, but the commands here should still work as long as Seafile continues to use MySQL/MariaDB.

The Seafile Admin Manual recommends using the following commands to backup your database container:

cd /backup/databases
docker exec -it seafile-mysql mariadb-dump  -u[username] -p[password] --opt ccnet_db > ccnet_db.sql
docker exec -it seafile-mysql mariadb-dump  -u[username] -p[password] --opt seafile_db > seafile_db.sql
docker exec -it seafile-mysql mariadb-dump  -u[username] -p[password] --opt seahub_db > seahub_db.sql

This works, and creates full backups for the main Seafile databases, but there are a few caveats you should be aware of:

1. Original character sets are not saved. This can cause files with Unicode names to be inacessible, as well as a few other nasty errors and side effects.
2. It does not save the MySQL/MariaDB users. This is fine for the root user, but you’ll have to manually create the db user after restoring.
3. You’ll have to run a lot of commands to copy, restore and configure a fresh database container.

While points 2 and 3 are likely nitpicks, they are still important to me as, in the event of a catastrophic failure that requires a full restore, I’d rather spend as little of my own time and effort on recovery as possible.

How I do it

I do not care about whatever benefits splitting the dump in three provides. If any of the databases become corrupted, I think it’s a better idea to start fresh instead of possibly causing an invalid, desynced state between databases.

To backup all databases (including the internal mysql database containing user data) to one file, this is the command I use:

docker exec -it seafile-mysql mariadb-dump -h --username=root --password=[root_password] \
        --opt \
        --default-character-set=utf8mb4 \
        --skip-set-charset \
        --all-databases \
        --events \
        --routines \
        --triggers \
        --flush-privileges \
    > /path/to/your/seafile-backup.sql.`date +"%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S"`

(Make sure to change mariadb-dump to mysqldump if you’re using an older Seafile version!)

What each option does:

• --default-character-set=utf8mb4 --skip-set-charset: Sets the default character set to UTF-8 and suppresses charset reconversion, preventing bugs with Unicode names;
• --all-databases --events --routines --triggers: Self-explanatory. Gets all databases, their events, routines and triggers;
• --flush-privileges: Required whenever the dump contains the mysql database (implied by --all-databases). Sends a FLUSH PRIVILEGES statement to the database at the end of the dump.

The dump will have the current date appended to it.

Recovering

Import it like any other mysql dump.

docker cp /path/to/your/seafile-backup.sql.2025-04-17-22-21-53 seafile-mysql:/tmp/seafile.sql
docker exec -it seafile-mysql /bin/sh -c "mysql -uroot -p[password] < /tmp/seafile.sql"