Tombsshfs

Tomb and sshfs

Abstract

If you want to use a remote server to store your personal data safely on a tomb, sshfs can help you. Indeed, an ssh server is one of the most common services in a server and sshfs allows you to mount the remote filesystem on your pc via ssh.

Advantages

• Easy to set-up, for syncing tomb between computers
• Much faster that TombDropbox : if you change one byte in a 1GB tomb, dropbox will re-send the whole file, which is very slow. sshfs will just send the differences, so this is surprisingly fast

Limitations

• NOT good for sharing in real-time: the same tomb cannot be opened by two different computers in read/write mode

HOWTO

Just copy your tomb on the remote server via scp:

scp /path/to/yourthings.tomb user@remote.host:/

Install Sshfs on your system, for example if you use debian do:

sudo apt-get install sshfs

Now you are ready to mount locally the remote file system:

sshfs -o allow_root user@remote.host:/ /local/mountpoint/

It's important to add the -o allow_root option because otherwise root will not have permissions to read in the remote filesystem.

Last but not least open your tomb:

tomb open /local/mountpoint/yourthings.tomb -k /path/to/key

That's all folks!

See also

• TombDropbox
• Varioustombhowto