I used s3fs, but this looks more stable. The s3fs I used created all these weird temporary files, and it lacked multiplatform support for macos. Cool!!
________________________________ From: [email protected] <[email protected]> To: Montreal Linux Users Group <[email protected]> Sent: Sat Oct 15 16:59:57 2011 Subject: [MLUG] s3backer Just wanted to give you a heads up about this cool program I have been playing with. It makes a virtual disk that is hosted on amazon s3. http://code.google.com/p/s3backer/ I'll just paste their description: "s3backer is a filesystem that contains a single file backed by the Amazon Simple Storage Service <http://aws.amazon.com/s3> (Amazon S3). As a filesystem, it is very simple: it provides a single normal file having a fixed size. Underneath, the file is divided up into blocks, and the content of each block is stored in a unique Amazon S3 object. In other words, what s3backer provides is really more like an S3-backed virtual hard disk device, rather than a filesystem. In typical usage, a normal filesystem is mounted on top of the file exported by the s3backer filesystem using a loopback mount (or disk image mount on Mac OS X). This arrangement has several benefits compared to more complete S3 filesystem implementations: * By not attempting to implement a complete filesystem, which is a complex undertaking and difficult to get right, s3backer can stay very lightweight and simple. Only three HTTP operations are used: GET, PUT, and DELETE. All of the experience and knowledge about how to properly implement filesystems that already exists can be reused. * By utilizing existing filesystems, you get full UNIX filesystem semantics. Subtle bugs or missing functionality relating to hard links, extended attributes, POSIX locking, etc. are avoided. * The gap between normal filesystem semantics and Amazon S3 ``eventual consistency'' is more easily and simply solved when one can interpret S3 objects as simple device blocks rather than filesystem objects (see below). * When storing your data on Amazon S3 servers, which are not under your control, the ability to encrypt data becomes a critical issue. s3backer supports secure encryption and authentication. Alternately, the encryption capability built into the Linux loopback device can be used. * Since S3 data is accessed over the network, local caching is also very important for performance reasons. Since s3backer presents the equivalent of a virtual hard disk to the kernel, most of the filesystem caching can be done where it should be: in the kernel, via the kernel's page cache. However s3backer also includes its own internal block cache for increased performance, using asynchronous worker threads to take advantage of the parallelism inherent in the network." Basically you get a network hosted disk that is mounted locally through loopback. It works great (I am hosting videos that are played straight off the drive to the web), is relatively simple to set up and use, and of course it is cloud-hosted so you can use it on more than one system. The cost of S3 is very reasonable, it is a compelling solution for backups, web storage, etc. Jeremy
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