SyncFS a way to use ZBackup to backup to the cloud

[Kevin Atkinson]

Hi All,

ZBackup currently lacks a way to backup directly to cloud storage such
as Google Drive or Amazon S3.

I wrote a FUSE file system to add this feature that I will like some
early feedback on. You can find it here:
https://github.com/kevina/syncfs. It should perform better and be more
reliably than most Fuse File Systems for cloud storage while at the same
time being more convenient to use and take up less disk space than a
traditional rsync type solution. Currently it only has a Google Drive
backend.

Usage for zbackup might go something like:

mkdir data
mkdir data/.etc
cp doc/syncfs-zbackup.conf data/.etc/syncfs.conf
cp doc/drive.conf data/.etc/drive.conf
mkdir backup
./syncfs data backup
# you will need to follow the instructions to authorize access to Google Drive
zbackup --non-encrypted init backup/
cat SOMEFILE | zbackup --non-encrypted backup backup/backups/test
sleep 5
# Now make sure everything has been uploaded
while pending=`cat backup/.proc/pending`
test -n "$pending"
do echo "SyncFS Still Busy..."
sleep 5
done
fusermount -u ./backup

See the provided README, and comments in the configuration file for
additional help.

With the provided configuration file, files in the tmp/ directory will
be uploaded ASAP and then renamed remotely to the final location. Also
all files not in bundles/ and tmp/ will be kept locally to speed up
additional backup operations.

Currently SysnFS will not block writes so if it can't upload fast enough
you might end up using a lot of disk space. In my tests on a Linnode
VPS the upload speed about matches the backup speed and space used was
kept minimal.

I am using it on a 13G disk partition it can likely scale up to large
backups within reason.

Thanks,
Kevin