GmailFS - The Google File System

Scott Granneman writes "Looking to use that new Gmail account for something really innovative? How about combining it with a brand new filesystem for Linux? Then GmailFS might be the answer: 'GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. ... GmailFS supports most file operations such as read, write, open, close, stat, symlink, link, unlink, truncate and rename.'"

Comments

Competing Search Service !

[Mr Europe]

Ond now we'll put up a competing internet search service using GMail disk space !

GoogleOS

[ols22]

They're obviously setting themselves up to enter the OS/desktop market.

Great!

[Yeechang Lee]

Thanks to GmailFS, I can now look forward to seeing the following files when I log into my computer:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 ylee ylee 2384 Aug 28 04:25 BUY V1AGRA N0W.pdf
-rw------- 1 ylee ylee 3723 Aug 28 04:39 RE: Stupid weomn cheating.xls
-rw------- 1 ylee ylee 2342 Aug 28 05:05 URGENT RESPONSE NEEDED.doc

Thanks, GmailFS!

I would try this . . .

[acceleriter]

. . . but I have a feelng that fsck would take a long time were Gmail to die during a write :).

Booting

[arose]

Can I boot my computer from my GMail account now?

hi Bender !

[Anonymous Coward]

"it were legitimate hi-res surface-scans of metal structures, entirely educational."

That's a nice way to describe robot pr0n, Bender. Way to go!

Re:Useless. Use GMX.net instead

[CableModemSniper]

Awesome! Now I am glad I took German in HS too.

Re:why?

[CableModemSniper]

Theres lots of things wrong with the filesystems availible for Windows and Linux, I'm sure. But even if that was a reason for this, this doesn't fix it. (Since it's just a Unix like FS that happens to use GMail as the storage device as opposed to a physical drive). I'm sure the coder didn't say to himself, "You know what's wrong with file-systems today? They aren't implemented as a slow screen-scrapping interface to webmail!". It was probably more along the lines of "Crap, I only have enough HDD space left for some Python scripts and FUSE...hmm GMail gives me a gig..."

Re:Nice

[Scarblac]

Affected people go crying to Google wanting un-backed-up data back, but Google declares that was "your problem".

Affected people start running RAID-1 on a bunch of Gmail accounts :-)

hmm... RAID?

[maverick215]

If I had 2 accts can I have RAID-0 for faster access? :)

Re:hmm... RAID?

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be
RAFEA-0
Redundant
Array of
Free
Email
Accounts

Re:Nice

[LostCluster]

I know of no RAID system that can recover from the sudden loss of all disks involved in the same moment without data loss.

Re:...Which brings up another point

[KarmaMB84]

They probably expect people to fill it up slowly with E-MAIL rather than uploading their pr0n collections etc.

i just invented SLASHDOT_FS

[goombah99]

Hi I'm working on a flie system called SLASHDOT_FS. it treats the slashdot message posting system as an unlimited write-once file storage system. Data is written to a comments and then changes are updated as diffs in the replys.

comments are encrypted and written using dictionary words to avoid the lameness filter.

I implemented the prototype of this system many years ago using an encoding system called First-Post. I simply use different permuations of the words first-post (FP!, Frist psot!, etc...) along with various dummy account names to encode 1 Kilobyte of information. I run the whole thing off ny Newton.

Re:i just invented SLASHDOT_FS

[Kethinov]

Moron.
Use journal entries for Slashdot_FS, not comments. Journal entries can be read and written to at will and don't suffer from the lameness filter. You get unlimited read/write filesystem! :)

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[pegr]

" You also agree that you will not use any... ...manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service. "

Seems using GMail is against their terms of service...