Mounting Backblaze B2: s3fs / rclone / GeeseFS / goofys?
Mounting Backblaze B2: s3fs / rclone / GeeseFS / goofys?
I want to mount some B2 buckets on Linux for read/write access. What do people recommend?
s3fs, rclone or GeeseFS seem to be the sensible choices, but please share your hard-won opinions with me.
edit: or goofys?
What's your use-case? What do you want to achieve?
Using blob storages as filesystems doesn't work well and could - with B2's pricing structure - became excessively expensive. Blob storages are designed for easily writing and reading individual blobs. Filesystems are designed for random access, listing, traversal, etc.
7It's for storing a few terabytes of fairly static media (for the most part, write-once). The codebases using it don't natively support object storage (and will be in Docker containers).
It's on a Hetzner server, and Backblaze (even after the price increase) will be a lot cheaper than normal drives, although their storage box option is probably better value over about two GB.
2But the thing is: B2 is cheap for storage, but retrieval and traversal are very expensive. And if that happens transparently on the filesystem (because you accidentally run
grepor the service in question regularly hashes the files or something), you would implicitly download everything stored. And IIRC retrieval costs ten times the storage costs... each time.)7
My use case is different (B2 for offsite data backups) but I went down the path of rclone and it has been working out very well. A lot better than I expected. I read their official docs (installation, usage, the backblaze setup and crypt) to get started. Played at the command line for a few minutes and realize how quick and easy it was. Wrote a script to automate it and off to the races I went!
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