Amazon S3 bucket as mounted drive in OSX?

July 21, 2010 11:16 AM

Best way to simply mount an Amazon S3 bucket as a drive in OSX?

I looked at JungleDisk, but it seems you have to pay? I just want a disk mounted on demand so I can rsync my backups to it.

posted by xmutex to Technology (14 answers total)

You should check out Transmit. I haven't used it for this specific purpose, but I know it can do it. It's a great app, really polished. It's $34 for a license.
posted by crosbyh at 11:25 AM on July 21, 2010

Nthing Transmit, specifically the Transmit Disk feature.
posted by fairytale of los angeles at 11:39 AM on July 21, 2010

Response by poster: Can you mount/unmount a Transmit disk w/ a shell script?
posted by xmutex at 11:41 AM on July 21, 2010

I didn't know offhand, so I've asked Panic about it. My suspicion is "yes, since it's just MacFUSE under the hood," but my suspicion is not an answer when I'm sitting in a Macless office.
posted by fairytale of los angeles at 11:51 AM on July 21, 2010 [1 favorite]

There are open source tools that will backup directly to S3. Cumulus and Brackup come to mind.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 11:58 AM on July 21, 2010

Response by poster: qxntpqbbbqxl - That's cool, but I just want an old rsync script to be able to access a mounted drive. So simple!
posted by xmutex at 11:59 AM on July 21, 2010

Panic thinks it can't be scripted, but I would probably email them and ask them in a more detailed format, since that's Cabel telling me his best guess.
posted by fairytale of los angeles at 12:00 PM on July 21, 2010

(Thanks for the heads up F.O.L.A.)

You can mount and unmount Transmit Disks using AppleScript, and you can run AppleScript in the shell via "osascript". So, with a little legwork, this seems possible. :)

You can hit us up on e-mail if you have more questions!
posted by cabel at 12:11 PM on July 21, 2010

Response by poster: Oh, cool, osascript's a perfectly useful solution. I'll try it out tonight. Thanks!
posted by xmutex at 12:23 PM on July 21, 2010

I think this is where I point out how awesome Panic & Cabel are. Get their stuff - it rocks. The mountable remote disk feature of Transmit 4 is very close to magic.
posted by Aquaman at 12:30 PM on July 21, 2010

There's also ExpanDrive.
posted by sharkfu at 1:28 PM on July 21, 2010

Don't use rsync; use duplicity. It can transfer data to S3.
posted by PueExMachina at 7:10 PM on July 21, 2010

Echoing the don't-use-rsync notion. Rsync calculates rolling checksums that require reading the entirety of every file being synced. Over SSH, this is no big deal, since the rsync process that calculates the checksums runs on the remote end, so while it all gets read from disk, it doesn't all get transferred over the wire. Here, though, rsync will assume (since the bucket is mounted) that the files are local, and will attempt to read them in their entirety, which will cause them to be transferred from S3 to your local machine (possibly to disk or possibly to RAM, depending on the implementation of the virtual filesystem), and this will happen every time you sync. Not only is that slow, but S3 charges per unit of transfer, so it's probably a bad idea, cost-wise, as well.

This, by the way, is exactly why rsync doesn't support synchronization via protocols like FTP: it's only designed to be able to run when it can execute the checksum calculations directly on the remote host.
posted by andrewpendleton at 7:46 PM on July 21, 2010 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Argh. You guys are killing me. I was so set on S3 w/ rsync, now I'm hesitant. Dropbox is awesome, and I use it, but when you're backing up 50-75GB, S3 is so much cheaper.

I'll check out duplicity, etc. Thanks for the feedback.
posted by xmutex at 8:19 PM on July 21, 2010