On the underlying server filesystem, MinIO seems to store the content of an uploaded file (e.g. X) in a file called xl.meta in a directory bearing the original file name (e.g. X/xl.meta).
However, the file xl.meta is encoded. How can I access the original file content on the server file system itself (i.e. see the text inside a plain text file or being able to play a sound file with a respective application)?
11 Answer
It would not be possible since the object you are seeing on the backend fs is not the actual object, it is only the erasure coded part(s) that is split across all the disks in a given erasure set. So, you could do it if you were just using fs mode (single node, single disk) but in erasure coded environment you will need to have quorum to be able to download the object, and that via an S3 supported method and not directly from the backend. Technically not quorum, rather n/2 if you just want to read the object, but as a rule you should avoid doing anything in the backend fs.
If you happen to want to just see the contents of xl.meta, and not recover the file itself, you can use this something like mc support inspect myminio/test/syslog/xl.meta --export=json (or you can build a binary from but using mc is probably easier).
