Linux uses S3QL to create an encrypted file system

In Linux system operation, S3QL can be used to create an encrypted file system that can store data online. How does Amazon S3 based S3QL create a cloud-encrypted file system? Let's take a look at it with Xiaobian.

Commercial cloud storage services such as Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage offer highly available, scalable, and unlimited capacity object storage services at an affordable price. To accelerate the widespread adoption of these cloud offerings, these providers have developed a good developer ecosystem for their products through clear APIs and SDKs. The cloud-based file system is a typical product in these active developer communities, and there are several open source implementations.

S3QL is one of the most popular open source cloud file systems. It is a FUSE-based file system that provides several commercial or open source cloud storage backends such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Rackspace CloudFiles, and OpenStack. As a full-featured file system, S3QL has many powerful features: file size up to 2T, compression, UNIX attributes, encryption, snapshots based on copy-on-write, immutable trees, deduplication, and soft and hard links. Support and so on. Any data written to the S3QL file system will be compressed and encrypted locally before being transferred to the cloud backend. When you try to extract content from the S3QL file system, if they are not in the local cache, the corresponding object will be downloaded from the cloud and then decrypted and decompressed on the fly.

To be clear, S3QL does have its limitations. For example, you can't mount the same S3FS file system on several different computers at the same time. Only one computer can access it at the same time. In addition, ACL (Access Control List) is not supported.

In this tutorial, I will describe how to configure an encrypted file system with S3QL based on Amazon S3. As a usage example, I will also show you how to run the rsync backup tool on a mounted S3QL file system.

Getting Ready

This tutorial first requires you to create an Amazon AWS account (registration is free, but requires a valid credit card).

Then create an AWS access key (access key ID and secret access key) that S3QL uses to access your AWS account.

Then access AWS S3 through the AWS Management Panel and create a new empty bucket for S3QL.

for the best performance reasons, choose your nearest area on a geography.

Installation S3QL

On Linux has prebuilt S3QL package in most Linux distributions.

For Debian, Ubuntu or Linux Mint:

$ sudo apt-get install s3ql

For Fedora:

$ sudo yum install s3ql

For Arch Linux, use AUR.
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