File System Creation¶
A S3QL file system is created with the mkfs.s3ql command. It has the following syntax:
mkfs.s3ql [options] <storage url>
This command accepts the following options:
--cachedir <path> Store cached data in this directory (default: ~/.s3ql)
--debug-modules <modules> Activate debugging output from specified modules (use commas to separate multiple modules). Debug messages will be written to the target specified by the --log
option.--debug Activate debugging output from all S3QL modules. Debug messages will be written to the target specified by the --log
option.--quiet be really quiet --backend-options <options> Backend specific options (separate by commas). See backend documentation for available options. --version just print program version and exit --authfile <path> Read authentication credentials from this file (default: ~/.s3ql/authinfo2)
-L <name> Filesystem label --max-obj-size <size> Maximum size of storage objects in KiB. Files bigger than this will be spread over multiple objects in the storage backend. Default: 10240 KiB. --plain Create unencrypted file system. --force Overwrite any existing data.
Unless you have specified the --plain
option,
mkfs.s3ql will ask you to enter an encryption
password. This password will not be read from an authentication file
specified with the --authfile
option to prevent accidental
creation of an encrypted file system.
Note that:
- All data that is stored under the given storage url is assumed to managed exclusively by S3QL. Trying to manually save additional objects (or remove or manipulate existing objects) will lead to file system corruption, and fsck.s3ql may delete objects that do not belong to the file system.
- With most storage backends, slashes in the storage url prefix do not
have special meaning. For example, the storage urls
s3://mybucket/myprefix/
ands3://mybucket/myprefix
are distinct. In the first case, the prefix ismyprefix/
, while in the second it ismyprefix
. - S3QL file systems can not be “stacked”, i.e. you cannot have one
file system stored at
s3://bucketname/outerprefix
and a second one ats3://bucketname/outerprefix/innerprefix
.