offs

offs (OFfline FileSystem) is a distributed file system with offline work support.

Features

• Distributed: allows any number of clients to be simultaneously connected to the same server.
• File system: the data is visible as a filesystem, allowing easy access via existing system tools.
• Cached: the files that were opened at least once can be accessed again without internet connection, be worked on, and the changes are synchronized once the network access is regained.
• Content-addressable: repeating file chunks are compressed away, so there is no need to re-download the same big file.

Dependencies

• D-Bus
• FUSE 2.x
• SQLite

Build dependencies

• Cargo (Rust stable, beta, or nightly)
• D-Bus development libraries
• SQLite development libraries
• capnp tool

Building

After installing Cargo, execute:

cargo build --release

The binaries can be found inside target/release directory.

Usage

Server

offs-server [-s store.db] [LISTEN ADDRESS]

-s option may be included to specify the file store database path. The port that the server is listening at may be specified as the ADDRESS parameter (default: 0.0.0.0:10031)

Client

offs-client [-c cache.db] <ADDRESS> <MOUNTPOINT>

The client requires the server address and a path to mount the filesystem in.

Clientctl

offs-clientctl [-m mountpoint] offline-mode <on/off>

The client can be controlled during operation via clientctl. Use the -m option to specify the client to control in case you have multiple instances running at once.