Important note: while what is in this README is still relevant for the code in this project, I have stopped developing the python version of sharebox. Due to performance issues, I have switched to a C version, which makes copying big files one order of magnitude faster.

See https://github.com/chmduquesne/sharebox-fs

Sharebox is a distributed FUSE filesystem for sharing files across several machines.

• [ok] It supports disconnected operations: you can go offline and modify a file and the modifications will be propagated when you'll be back.
• [not implemented - see the branch mergetool] If several hosts modify the same file, an interactive conflict handler is spawned on the hosts (but only one host needs to resolve the conflict).
• [ok] Of course, built-in automatic versioning is provided
• [not implemented] with a configurable number of versions.
• [ok] It is also space-efficient: files appear as present on the system but are actually downloaded from peers on demand.
• [not implemented] You can also control where your data lives with a set of commands.

Features:

• fully distributed
• offline operations
• copy on write
• builtin versioning
• interactive conflicts handling

An important detail: sharebox is nothing more than a very simple filesystem layer around the wonderful git-annex, which actually does all the work. You can thank its creator for being a genius.

== Walkthrough ==

1. We create an empty directory where to actually put the files. Sharebox will manage this directory for us.

   mkdir -p test/local/git

2. We create a directory that will be sharebox's mountpoint.

   mkdir -p test/local/mnt

3. We mount test/local/git into test/local/mnt.

   ./sharebox.py test/local/mnt -o gitdir=test/local/git

4. Now let's set up a mirror. We go with the usual commands.

   mkdir -p test/remote/git mkdir -p test/remote/mnt ./sharebox.py test/remote/mnt -o gitdir=test/remote/git

5. We still need to set the git directories as remotes.

   cd test/remote/git git remote add local ../../local/git cd ../../local/git git remote add remote ../../remote/git cd ../../..

6. It is now time for testing! Let us create a file.

   echo test > test/local/mnt/foo

7. There is nothing on the remote.

   ls test/remote/mnt

8. We will now tell the remote filesystem to synchronize. (This typically goes in a crontab.)

   ./sharebox.py --command sync test/remote/mnt

9. The remote now appears to have the file foo. However, it is not really here (it would if we had mounted it with the option "-o getall"). We can see a file named foo, but its size appears to be 0.

   ls -l test/remote/mnt total 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 0 2011-03-31 18:16 foo

10. Though if we try to access to foo, it is downloaded on the fly:

    touch test/remote/mnt/foo cat test/remote/mnt/foo test

11. We are done. We can unmount the two directories.

    fusermount -u test/local/mnt fusermount -u test/remote/mnt

== State of the project ==

Sharebox is at a very early stage. Even the author still does not use it as a working solution. There are features that are not implemented, and there are features that haven't even been decided.

What is not implemented:

• As usual, there is no documentation and very few unit tests
• Conflicts are not handled yet
• The number of copies kept for the same file is not setable yet, but it should become a mount option.
• There is no way to drop unnecessary copies, nor to get deleted files

== Debugging ==

To debug, mount with the foreground option:

sharebox.py test/local/mnt -o gitdir=test/local/git -o foreground