webdav or sftp for easy browsing / restoring?

[ThomasWaldmann]

borg could offer a webdav or sftp server as an alternative to the FUSE-based borg mount.

users then would just start that server and either use a browser (webdav) or a sftp client to browse and restore files.

Why yet another system, we already have borg mount!?

borg mount is nice - but FUSE has some issues:

• on macOS, it requires macFUSE, which requires a kernel extension, which requires going into the firmware and allowing kernel extensions
• on Linux, users are sometimes stumbling over fuse configuration or installation
• some other OSes are more or less behind and only support fuse2, not fuse3
• FUSE on windows not supported yet by borg, we have a ticket for that
• FUSE libs for Python have more or less maintenance issues (llfuse not developed any more, pyfuse3 development resumed (but seems to depend on 1 developer), mfusepy also only a few developers)
• maintaining code for 3 different FUSE libs (llfuse, pyfuse3, mfusepy) in borg isn't great either

Guess it can't really replace FUSE though.

Using WebDAV/ftp/sftp does not result in a mounted "borg" file system.

There might be FUSE filesystems on top of WebDAV/sftp/ftp, but likely they are even more lossy considering supported metadata than borg's borgfs (borg mount).

Update: webdav can be mounted

• windows
• macOS
• Linux GNOME/KDE

[ThomasWaldmann]

Did a bit of research: webdav seems to have the best platform support.

[PhrozenByte]

Just to throw in a few more ideas: traditional FTP, NFS, SMB/Samba, or an embedded local web UI.

Both NFS and SMB would be "true" alternatives to FUSE (in terms of "equally powerful"), but they're considerably more complex to implement. As far as I'm aware, there are no mature, well-supported Python libraries for implementing either an NFS or SMB server, so these options are probably not very practical.

An embedded local web UI would be by far the most portable solution and likely the easiest to use for non-technical users. However, it cannot provide native filesystem semantics, so basically all metadata is lost. On the other hand, it could have an architectural advantage: borg2 already implements a REST API for low-level remote storage access. A web UI could thus act as a catalyst for evolving that API beyond its current low-level focus, exposing higher-level (yet intentionally limited) archive browsing and file access functionality that could be reused by lightweight third-party tools. Whether expanding the REST API in that direction would actually be desirable is another question, but I think it's an interesting idea.

The biggest advantage of WebDAV is that it's supported out of the box by all major desktop operating systems, allowing users to mount an archive without installing additional software. However, WebDAV's rather inconsistent API is also one of its biggest weaknesses: clients tend to have various quirks, and support for more advanced features differs considerably between implementations.

SFTP doesn't suffer from this, although it typically requires a dedicated client or integration in the user's file manager. On the other hand, it also seems like the easiest protocol to implement, since its API maps fairly naturally to the existing FUSE-like filesystem abstraction.

Traditional FTP is another possibility and is supported by many clients. However, it is a legacy protocol with a comparatively awkward design and offers little practical benefit over SFTP for exposing Borg's virtual filesystem.

[ThomasWaldmann]

#9944 :)

[ThomasWaldmann]

WebDAV has also the advantage (for simple use cases) that it can be use in multiple ways:

• via web interface, using a browser - feels like a internet download site and is super easy to use
• via OS- or file-manager level WebDav support, the user can use the usual file manager to browse the archives
• guess by using a webdav FUSE fs software (external, not in borg), it could be even mounted (with minimal metadata support though)