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).

Install YAML for python as follows:

sudo apt-get install python-yaml

Install FUSE and B2 Command Line Tool for python as follows:

sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install fusepy
sudo pip install b2

If the above does not work (a possibility on Python 2.7) use this instead:

sudo python -m pip install fusepy
sudo python -m pip install b2

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:

python b2fuse.py <mountpoint>

Full usage info:

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

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>

Permanent mount points

Setup

1. put contents of b2_fuse-master in /etc/b2fuse
2. create the config.yaml mentioned in the github documenation in /etc/b2fuse
3. create /mnt/b2fuse-mount & make it owned by the admin account this is being done under and then add it to the group www-data
4. chown 775 b2fuse-mount

Start as a Service

NOTE: Below are a few ways this can be done. The guide below is only complete when utilizing upstart in Ubuntu, though links for reference to other methods are included.

Ubuntu with upstart

This has been seen to work in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as well as 16.04 LTS

• create /etc/init/b2fuse.conf (this will allow the b2fuse mount to start when the system starts...)
• In b2fuse.conf put the following lines

start on filesystem
exec python /etc/b2fuse/b2fuse.py /mnt/b2fuse-mount

Ubuntu without upstart

• There are many options listed here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24518522/run-python-script-at-startup-in-ubuntu

Red Hat/CentOS

• Follow the instructions and make sure the options you choose make the command run when the OS starts
• http://www.abhigupta.com/2010/06/how-to-auto-start-services-on-boot-in-centos-redhat/

Any other Linux versions that don't work like the above

• Make sure to find instructions and follow them to start the python script when the OS starts under an appropriate run level. NOTE: Mounting the fuse drive as root may cause problems (which is a problem that may occur if attempting to use roots crontab).

Known issues:

• Concurrent access from multiple client will lead to inconsistent results
• Small files give low read/write performance (due to high latency)

License: MIT license