b2_fuse - FUSE for Backblaze B2

Version: 1.3

This is fresh release based upon B2 Command line tool's API for B2.

Warning this software may contain bugs, be careful of using it with important data.

Please report bugs, use-case issues and feature requests through the Github issue tracker

Basic setup:

Requires YAML and FUSE for python to work (this is not the same as "python-fuse" package).

Python2 setup

Install YAML for python as follows:

sudo apt-get install python-yaml

Install via pip:

sudo pip install b2fuse

Or install from code in development mode by executing in the base directory of this repository:

sudo python setup.py develop

If the above does not work (a possibility on Python 2.7), you can also install FUSE and the B2 Command Line Tool dependencies as follows:

sudo python -m pip install fusepy b2

Python3 setup

Install dependencies for Python3 as follows:

sudo python -m pip install fusepy b2 pyyaml

Install B2Fuse itself for Python3:

sudo python setup.py install

Configuration and usage

You will need a config.yaml file in the folder where you run the fuse driver. An example config ("config.yaml"):

accountId: <youraccountid>
applicationKey: <yourapplicationid>
bucketId: <yourbucketid>

In order to use the FUSE driver as an interface to the online service B2 run:

b2fuse <mountpoint>

Full usage info:

usage: b2fuse [-h] [--enable_hashfiles] [--version] [--use_disk] [--debug]
              [--account_id ACCOUNT_ID] [--application_key APPLICATION_KEY]
              [--bucket_id BUCKET_ID] [--temp_folder TEMP_FOLDER]
              [--config_filename CONFIG_FILENAME] [--allow_other]
              mountpoint

positional arguments:
  mountpoint            Mountpoint for the B2 bucket

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --enable_hashfiles    Enable normally hidden hashes as exposed by B2 API
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  --use_disk
  --account_id ACCOUNT_ID
                        Account ID for your B2 account (overrides config)
  --application_key APPLICATION_KEY
                        Application key for your account (overrides config)
  --bucket_id BUCKET_ID
                        Bucket ID for the bucket to mount (overrides config)
  --temp_folder TEMP_FOLDER
                        Temporary file folder
  --config_filename CONFIG_FILENAME
                        Config file

Usage notes:

• Can be used as a regular filesystem, but should not (high latency)
• Files are cached in memory or on disk. If using memory you are limited by the available memory, swapping will occur for very large files.
• Neither permissions or timestamps are supported by B2. B2_fuse ignores any requests to set permissions.
• Filesystem contains ".sha1" files, these are undeletable and contain the hash of the file without the postfix. This feature can be disabled by setting variable "enable_hashfiles" to False.
• For optimal performance and throughput, you should store a few large files. Small files suffer from latency issues due to the way B2 API is implemented. Large files will allow you to saturate your internet connection.

Testing

Go to the repostiory root directory, create a folder called mountpoint and run the test by calling

python -m "b2fuse.tier1_tests"

Application specific notes:

Using RSync with B2 Fuse

Since there is no support for updating file times or permissions in a bucket, rsync must be told to ignore both when synching folders (sync will be based on checksum meaning files have to be downloaded to compare).

rsync -avzh --no-perms --no-owner --no-group dir1/ dir2/ 

Option "--inplace" may also be useful. RSync creates a temporary file when syncing, this option will make RSync update the file inplace instead (Effectively twice as fast syncing).

Using unison to synchronize against mounted folder

Again, we ignore permissions as these are not applicable.

unison dir1/ dir2/ -auto  -perms 0  -batch

Using encfs to overlay a locally encrypted filesystem onto the bucket

Install encfs (apt-get install encfs)

encfs <bucket_mountpoint> <encrypted_filesystem>

Instruction for permanent mounting of B2Fuse can be found here

Known issues:

• Concurrent access from multiple client will lead to inconsistent results
• Small files give low read/write performance (due to high latency)
• Some text editors may return odd characters when viewing the ".sha1" files. Use cat for reliable operation.

License: MIT license