brackup-mount - mount a backup as a filesystem using FUSE
brackup-mount <metafile> <mountpoint>
"brackup-mount" allows you to mount a backup into your filesystem at a
particular mount point. Once it's mounted, you'll have a read-only view of the
directories and files in the backup at the mountpoint given.
For example:
brackup-mount somebackup-20080203.brackup /mnt
This might be useful if you need to refer to something from a backup but you
don't want to do a full restore. You can also, if you like, do something
resembling a restore by mounting a backup and copying the contents into your
"real" filesystem.
Before using this utility, you'll need to install the "Fuse" library
from CPAN:
perl -MCPAN -e "install Fuse"
If you're on a Debian-like system then this might be a better idea:
apt-get install libfuse-perl
This program is EXPERIMENTAL. Do not use it for anything important.
"brackup-mount" reads the metafile it is given and uses the metadata
within to create a filesystem that is exposed via FUSE. All operations apart
from reading from files operate purely on the in-memory data structure created
from the metafile, and so you can "ls" and "stat" files to
your heart's content without worrying about expensive calls to your target.
When a process calls "open" on a file, the file will be effectively
"restored" from the backup target into a temporary directory, where
it will remain until it is ultimately "close"d. All "read"
operations on the file are performed on the temporary file. This means that
you can expect the "open" call to be the most expensive call against
this filesystem.
If you're paying for data transfer from your target, be aware that the local
copy retrieved on "open" is thrown away on "close", so if
you plan to be opening and closing the same file repeatedly you might want to
force the local copy to be retained for the duration by running something like
"tail -f filename" in another terminal.
Since Brackup does not retain information about file ownership, all files in the
mounted filesystem will be owned by the user that mounted the filesystem. The
permissions from the brackup metafile are returned to "stat" (so you
can do "cp -P"), but aren't enforced on "open".
Martin Atkins <mart@degeneration.co.uk>
This program and its associated library are part of the Brackup distribution and
can be disstributed under the same terms as Brackup itself.