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.
brackup-mount
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:
Fuse
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.
ls
stat
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 closed. 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.
open
close
read
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.
tail -f filename
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.
cp -P
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.
To install Brackup, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm
cpanm Brackup
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell install Brackup
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.