bfsync - Documentation

SYNOPSIS

bfsyncfs [<options>] <repo> <mount-point>

DESCRIPTION

bfsyncfs is a FuSE filesystem which can be used to modify the contents of a bfsync repsitory. To use it, you need a local bfsync checkout <repo> (created with bfsync-clone(1)) and a mount point <mount-point>, which must be an empty directory before running bfsyncfs.

Upon successful mount, the mount point directory will be used to display the contents of the repository and modifications can be made with any program that can operate on files/directories, like a filemanager, rsync or regular shell commands like cp or mv.

Note that changes only become permanent after using bfsync-commit(1). Other bfsync commands can be used to synchronize the repository history/contents with other bfsync repos.

OPTIONS

-a
--all: Allows other users to access the mounted filesystem (this sets the -oallow_other option). Without this option, the contents of the filesystem will only be readable/writeable by the user that mounted it.
-c
--cache-attributes: Enable FUSE attribute caching. This improves the overall performance of bfsyncfs somewhat. However, in some rare cases the filesystem will no longer return the correct result to the userspace process, therefore it is not enabled by default.
-f
--foreground: Run the filesystem as foreground process. Without this option, bfsyncfs will be started as background process.
-d
--debug: Enables debugging output, this option is mainly useful during development/debugging.
-g <group>
--group <group>: This option is mainly useful for backup scripts. By setting a group, only processes which have the environment variable BFSYNC_GROUP set to the same value can access the filesystem. This means other processes that should not have been accessing the backup anyway (like locate or similar indexing daemons) are blocked.

Note that this is not a security feature. Everyone can set BFSYNC_GROUP to the value found in ps output. The option just protects the filesystem against access from other processes that may just happen to recursively crawl the file tree.
--show-all-versions: Normally bfsyncfs doesn’t display versions that have been deleted (for instance by bfsync-delete-version(1)). With this option it does display every version under .bfsync/commits/<version>.

While for versions that have not been deleted often all file contents are available, for deleted versions it is likely that some files cannot be accessed although they are shown

THE .bfsync DIRECTORY

Once a repository is mounted, all data contained in the current version of the repository will be available through the mount point. However, one additional directory will show up in the file system, the ".bfsync" directory. Within the .bfsync directory, all previous versions of the file system are available inside the commits directory.

So if you access the contents of .bfsync/commits/8, this directory will contain the contents of the repository version 8. It is not possible to modify old commits, the .bfsync directory is only for reading.

CONFIGURATION

There are configuration options from the repository config file that affect bfsyncfs, they are documented in the bfsync(1) manual page.