Simple fuse filesystem that can be used to get an erasure-coded view on a filesystem.

Erasure-coding provides a way to efficiently distribute data over several storage locations such that an arbitrary set of (say) 3 locations can be used to completely recover the data. zfec-fs uses the erasure coding algorithm zfec, which is part of Tahoe-LAFS.

This fuse filesystem can be used as a simple replacement of Tahoe-LAFS: Use it to provide the erasure-coded views on your data and keep those views in sync with your storage using for example rsync. That way, your storage nodes do not need to run Tahoe-LAFS.

Just type something like zfec_fs.py /mnt/zfec (you can play around with the parameters later, for help type zfec_fs.py --help) to obtain a virtual filesystem in /mnt/zfec. For each "share", there will be a subdirectory (i.e. /mnt/zfec/00, /mnt/zfec/01, /mnt/zfec/02, and so on) which contains an erasure-coded replica of your whole root filesystem. By default, the number of "required shares" is 3, so all the files will be roughly one third in size and only contain one third of the information. You can now choose an arbitrary subset of at least three of these shares and copy files over to your distributed backup. It is perfectly ok to just copy some files or subdirectories inside the replicas.

Just provide at least the number of required shares (i.e. three per default) with a common directory structure (it does not matter if some files are missing from some shares, as long as they are present in the required number of shares) in one directory, e.g. /tmp/restore. The directory names of the shares do not matter. Now call zfec_fs.py -o restore -o source=/tmp/restore /mnt/restored. Hopefully, your files should magically appear again in /mnt/restored, you just need to copy them.

The restore implementation is not yet resilient against corrupted data in shares. If a share provides a file, it is assumed that all data is intact and all shares reflect exactly the same state of that file. Note that, though, only the first required number of shares are used that contain a requested file to restore it, even if it is present in multiple shares.