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https://github.com/s3ql/s3ql

a full featured file system for online data storage
https://github.com/s3ql/s3ql

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a full featured file system for online data storage

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README 

        
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======

 S3QL

======



S3QL is a file system that stores all its data online using storage

services like `Google Storage`_, `Amazon S3`_, or OpenStack_. S3QL

effectively provides a virtual drive of dynamic, infinite capacity that

can be accessed from any computer with internet access.



S3QL is a full featured UNIX file system that is conceptually indistinguishable from a

local file system like ext4.  Furthermore, S3QL has additional features like compression

encryption, data de-duplication, immutable trees and snapshotting which make it especially

suitable for online backup and archival.



S3QL is designed to favor simplicity and elegance over performance and

feature-creep. Care has been taken to make the source code as

readable and serviceable as possible. Solid error detection and error

handling have been included from the very first line, and S3QL comes

with extensive automated test cases for all its components.



.. _`Google Storage`: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs

.. _`Amazon S3`: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/

.. _OpenStack: https://www.openstack.org/software/



Features

========



* **Transparency.** Conceptually, S3QL is indistinguishable from a

  local file system. For example, it supports hardlinks, symlinks,

  standard unix permissions, extended attributes and file

  sizes up to 2 TB.



* **Dynamic Size.** The size of an S3QL file system grows and shrinks

  dynamically as required.



* **Compression.** Before storage, all data may be compressed with the

  LZMA, bzip2 or deflate (gzip) algorithm.



* **Encryption.** After compression (but before upload), all data can be

  AES encrypted with a 256 bit key. An additional SHA256 HMAC checksum

  is used to protect the data against manipulation.



* **Data De-duplication.** If several files have identical contents,

  the redundant data will be stored only once. This works across all

  files stored in the file system, and also if only some parts of the

  files are identical while other parts differ.



* **Immutable Trees.** Directory trees can be made immutable, so that

  their contents can no longer be changed in any way whatsoever. This

  can be used to ensure that backups can not be modified after they

  have been made.



* **Copy-on-write snapshots.** S3QL can replicate entire directory

  trees without using any additional storage space. Only if one of the

  copies is modified, the part of the data that has been modified will

  take up additional storage space. This can be used to create

  intelligent snapshots that preserve the state of a directory at

  different points in time using a minimum amount of space.



* **Performance independent of network latency.** All operations

  that do not write or read file contents (like creating directories

  or moving, renaming, and changing permissions of files and

  directories) are very fast because they are carried out without any

  network transactions.



  S3QL achieves this by saving the entire file and directory structure

  in a database. This database is locally cached and the remote

  copy updated asynchronously.



* **Support for low bandwidth connections.** S3QL splits file contents

  into smaller blocks and caches blocks locally. This minimizes both

  the number of network transactions required for reading and writing

  data, and the amount of data that has to be transferred when only

  parts of a file are read or written.



Development Status

==================



S3QL is considered stable and suitable for production use.  Starting

with version 2.17.1, S3QL uses semantic versioning. This means that

backwards-incompatible versions (e.g., versions that require an

upgrade of the file system revision) will be reflected in an increase

of the major version number.



Supported Platforms

===================



S3QL is developed and tested under Linux. Users have also reported

running S3QL successfully on OS-X, FreeBSD and NetBSD. We try to

maintain compatibility with these systems, but (due to lack of

pre-release testers) we cannot guarantee that every release will run

on all non-Linux systems. Please report any bugs you find, and we will

try to fix them.



Typical Usage

=============



Before a file system can be mounted, the backend which will hold the

data has to be initialized. This is done with the *mkfs.s3ql*

command. Here we are using the Amazon S3 backend, and

*nikratio-s3ql-bucket* is the S3 bucket in which the file system will

be stored. ::



  mkfs.s3ql s3://ap-south-1/nikratio-s3ql-bucket



To mount the S3QL file system stored in the S3 bucket

*nikratio_s3ql_bucket* in the directory ``/mnt/s3ql``, enter::



  mount.s3ql s3://ap-south-1/nikratio-s3ql-bucket /mnt/s3ql



Now you can instruct your favorite backup program to run a backup into

the directory ``/mnt/s3ql`` and the data will be stored on Amazon

S3. When you are done, the file system has to be unmounted with ::



   umount.s3ql /mnt/s3ql



Need Help?

==========



The following resources are available:



* The `S3QL User's Guide`_.

* The `S3QL Wiki`_

* The `S3QL Mailing List`_. You

  can subscribe by sending a mail to

  `[email protected] `_.



Please report any bugs you may encounter in the `GitHub Issue Tracker`_.



Contributing

============



The S3QL source code is available on GitHub_.



.. _`S3QL User's Guide`: https://www.rath.org/s3ql-docs/

.. _`S3QL Wiki`: https://github.com/s3ql/s3ql/wiki

.. _`S3QL Mailing List`: https://groups.google.com/g/s3ql

.. _`GitHub Issue Tracker`: https://github.com/s3ql/s3ql/issues

.. _GitHub: https://github.com/s3ql/s3ql