Cloud Hosted Storage

scottalanmiller

I'm having a hard time understanding how to use storage that isn't treated like an SMB/NFS share.

Think RESTful API style storage.

Dashrender

@Dashrender said:

I'm having a hard time understanding how to use storage that isn't treated like an SMB/NFS share.

Think RESTful API style storage.

Try again, this time with a link explaining RESTful API

scottalanmiller

http://www.restapitutorial.com/lessons/whatisrest.html

KOOLER

@coliver said:

** You could look at http://www.cloudberrylab.com/ I think they do local mounting.**

In grad school I wrote a daemon that monitored a folder, in a Linux file system, and upload new files to a S3 instance. It would run when a file was written to that folder. It worked maybe 80% of the time.

We used this one before but found unreliable. Something goes wrong with Internet connection and it's very difficult to recover. WebDAV, SMB3 or application-specific integration (like one Veeam had done to their cloud connectivity also using ref'd software before) is a way to go. At least you can control data on your side @ all stages

coliver

@KOOLER said:

@coliver said:

** You could look at http://www.cloudberrylab.com/ I think they do local mounting.**

In grad school I wrote a daemon that monitored a folder, in a Linux file system, and upload new files to a S3 instance. It would run when a file was written to that folder. It worked maybe 80% of the time.

We used this one before but found unreliable. Something goes wrong with Internet connection and it's very difficult to recover. WebDAV, SMB3 or application-specific integration (like one Veeam had done to their cloud connectivity also using ref'd software before) is a way to go. At least you can control data on your side @ all stages

I was thinking that WebDav would be the perfect style storage for this. Windows can generally mount WebDav as a drive as well. Although you would probably need to setup a small Linux web server with something like SabreDav running.

Reid Cooper

WebDAV is supposed to work like that but it depends on the Windows client versions that you are using as to whether or not it will work reliably mounting it as a standard mapped drive.

scottalanmiller

@DustinB3403 said:

See that seems, almost too good for what it is. $60 bucks one time, to mount a remote share on our server.

I just realized that maybe you were thinking that this was a one time fee. It's a one time fee for the software but you still pay for Amazon S3 the same as you always would. So it is all of the costs of S3 plus $60, one time, per machine that will access it.

scottalanmiller

@Dashrender said:

I'm having a hard time understanding how to use storage that isn't treated like an SMB/NFS share.

Think about OneDrive, Google Drive, DropBox, etc. None of those use SMB or NFS shares. All require extra software running on your computer to interface between your desktop and the hosted storage.

In all of those cases, they are using HTTPS or something similar and just making PUTS and GETS on the files. Then they have local software that presents that to you as if it was a local drive.

scottalanmiller

@DustinB3403 said:

For simplicity cloud storage can run any file system you need. At least from what I'm seeing with Amazon S3.

No, not at all. There are no filesystems at all on "cloud storage." That's a terrible term as it is unrelated to cloud in any way. It's object storage that we are discussing.

Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, BackBlaze, Azure Storage, etc. is all the same, it is object storage. Conceptually there is no such thing as a file system on them. You can't even think of the storage that way, let alone attempt to apply a filesystem.

You are picturing a SAN delivering block storage. That's not what this is. And what everyone is hoping for is a network file system (NFS, SMB, AFP, etc.) which this is not. Object storage is a third storage type and quite different.

scottalanmiller

@DustinB3403 said:

So you could use something like WinSCP to connect to Amazon S3 service of yours assuming its configured as NFS / SMB Share and copy down or upload your file(s).

No, there are a couple things wrong here.

NFS / SMB are network file systems, not block storage. So this goes against what you posted in the line about about using whatever filesystem you want which means block storage. Neither block storage nor network file storage is an option on any of these products. Nor would you want it as even NFS is horribly weak over a WAN link and SMB is far worse.
WinSCP is a tool for SFTP, FTPS, SCP and FTP usage, not SMB or NFS. So that isn't the right tool in any circumstance here.