The sys admin’s daily grind: S3QL
Horror Pictures
Sys admin Charly has been an enthusiastic amateur photographer for many years. Recently, he started worrying about something happening to his rapidly expanding photo collection. Can the cloud save the day?
When I bought my first digital camera 10 years ago, backup wasn’t an issue. The 2Mpx point-and-shoot box created JPGs so small I could back up my photo gallery to a couple of CDs. Today, I use raw format, and I can easily have 10 or 20GB of material on the card when I get back from a Sunday outing. Even though not all of this ends up in my collection, I still have a fairly substantial amount of material to deal with. My works of art are stored on a small NAS box at home. But, I would additionally like to back them up somewhere outside my flood-endangered home. I was thinking of a cloud storage service like Amazon’s S3, and I would like to encrypt my photos when I store them.
While I was shopping around for a tool to do this for me, I stumbled across the S3QL filesystem [1]. S3QL splits my data into small blocks, encrypts the blocks, fires them off into the cloud, and stores them in an S3 bucket (Figure 1). “Bucket” is Amazon-speak for a leased storage slot.
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you've found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
PipeWire 1.0 Officially Released
PipeWire was created to take the place of the oft-troubled PulseAudio and has finally reached the 1.0 status as a major update with plenty of improvements and the usual bug fixes.
-
Rocky Linux 9.3 Available for Download
The latest version of the RHEL alternative is now available and brings back cloud and container images for ppc64le along with plenty of new features and fixes.
-
Ubuntu Budgie Shifts How to Tackle Wayland
Ubuntu Budgie has yet to make the switch to Wayland but with a change in approaches, they're finally on track to making it happen.
-
TUXEDO's New Ultraportable Linux Workstation Released
The TUXEDO Pulse 14 blends portability with power, thanks to the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS CPU.
-
AlmaLinux Will No Longer Be "Just Another RHEL Clone"
With the release of AlmaLinux 9.3, the distribution will be built entirely from upstream sources.
-
elementary OS 8 Has a Big Surprise in Store
When elementary OS 8 finally arrives, it will not only be based on Ubuntu 24.04 but it will also default to Wayland for better performance and security.
-
OpenELA Releases Enterprise Linux Source Code
With Red Hat restricting the source for RHEL, it was only a matter of time before those who depended on that source struck out on their own.
-
StripedFly Malware Hiding in Plain Sight as a Cryptocurrency Miner
A rather deceptive piece of malware has infected 1 million Windows and Linux hosts since 2017.
-
Experimental Wayland Support Planned for Linux Mint 21.3
As with most Linux distributions, the migration to Wayland is in full force. While some distributions have already made the move, Linux Mint has been a bit slower to do so.
-
Window Maker Live 0.96.0-0 Released
If you're a fan of the Window Maker window manager, there's a new official release of the Linux distribution that champions the old-school user interface.