About indexing

[yann117]

So, I'm discovering your fork from filebrowser due to the "handover" topic there.

I had a look and it looks promising, but then I saw that it is running an index in the backend. I'm not really fan of an index, especially for this kind of tool/service, so I hoped we could not enable it, and here I'm reading through your documentation, where you mention this:

Can I disable the index and still use FileBrowser Quantum?

You can disable the index by specifying a source config and setting disabled: true in the source config. You will still be able to browse your files, but the search will not work and you may run into issues as it's not intended to be used without indexing.

I'm not sure why you would run it like this, if you have a good reason please open an issue request on how you would like it to work -- and why you would run it without the index.

It configured my Quantum like that and unfortunately nothing is working with indexing disabled:

• Trying to upload few files (images), the first one went fine, then immediately an error message (HTTP Status 500) stating that "this folder has indexing disabled" ... yeah right ...
• I can however upload files one by one, of course that was just for testing purpose. But the UI doesn't refresh/show them, I have to refresh it manually to see the files present
• When I double click a file, it is supposed to display the image, but again it is failing again with a 500 on the api call:
  /api/raw?files=srv::%2F20250205_201653.jpg%2F20250205_201653.jpg&inline=true
  This is quite strange as this would be the very basic request/access to the underlying storage, and the preview/thumbnail itself is working
• Also, when I select a file, there is no action toolbar displayed, no download, delete, rename options...

I'm surprised as you mention in the fb thread that you consider your tool is about to deprecate/replace it in just a few months...
Either I'm missing something (like the basic default config lack enabling lot's of features), or we really don't have the same experience with fb-quantum.

I'll monitor the progress in the future, but for now it is not quite ready for me.

Coming back to why I raised this discussion, is because you mentioned you would be interested to know for which reason we don't want indexing. For me it is the fact that for a filebrowser tool, I expect it to rely solely on the backend/filesystem.

The goal being that the files and structure are self-sufficient, and it is not requiring a side task that has a cost:

• CPU, memory and disk usage
• is not real-time
• if the index is corrupted we'll run into problems (for sure we can rebuild it, but that is annoying and will cause loss of confidence)

Then I'll return back the question, "Why would we need indexing?"

If it is only for improving the search, then that is bad ... I never used the search ever in those tenth of years using computers.
My files are well structured, assets and documents, everything is well organized, I absolutely never use the filemanager search in my OS.

[gtsteffaniak]

The star of the show for FileBrowser Quantum is the index and that's not going to change. You can disable it but you loose a lot of functionality doing so.

For now the functionalityis search, folder size calculations, and general filesystem stats.

More functionality in the future will rely on it, like sidebar tree navigation , metrics, jobs, and notifications.

I'd recommend finding another repository if it doesn't fit what you are looking for.