Emergency Console

You should never start more than one server using the same database directory, independent of the mode of operation. Normally, ArangoDB will prevent you from doing this by placing a lockfile in the database directory and not allowing a second ArangoDB instance to use the same database directory if a lockfile is already present.

Note: Never start the emergency console for a database which also has a server attached to it. In general, the ArangoDB shell is what you want.

However, it is very likely that you will never need the emergency console unless you are an ArangoDB developer.