I was really excited when I upgraded my bacula server to CentOS 7 and installed the latest version of s3fs. Because I found that I was able to mount an s3 bucket to my local file system with the right user id and permissions to use with bacula. 

 

 My old server was a centos 5.9 host and that version of s3fs wouldn't allow you to set the uid/gid for the directory you're mounting to. 

 And what I've found is that backing up to S3 with these latest versions works GREAT!! I am able to create tapes on my S3 mounted backup directory. And the backups complete without any complaint from the bacula system. 

However the problem comes in restoring files. Because what I've found is that the restores will fail even if you are restoring just one tiny file. I tried restoring a resolv.conf file. 

What happens is that the s3fs directory disconnects from s3 and bacula gives a 'waiting for mount request' that seems to go on forever. 

If I do a listing of the directory at this point, on the command line outside the bacula environment I get a 'transport disconnected' error. I'm not sure why backing up to S3 is fine but restoring is not. 

What I'd like to know is if there are any other alternatives to S3FS out there that would allow you to mount an S3 bucket on your local file systems and use it for backups and restores. 

Also I'm wondering if there's any optimizations or changes that anyone may know about that I can do to S3FS to allow this to work?

Thanks,

Tim

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