Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Installation
   1. Requirements
   2. Install
3. Example
   1. Running PreservedFS example
   2. Using PreservedFS example

Introduction

PreservedFS is a Filesystem in Userspace that aims at mounting a folder, doing modifications inside the mounted folder while preserving the original files.

To achieve this, PreservedFS uses three folders :

• target or root: the folder to be mounted
• local: the folder that will keep only the modifications from target
• mnt: the folder you will browse that is an union of target and local that reflect the original files with the changes from local.

Installation

Requirements

You need Python 2.3 or newer to be installed. You also need the libfuse library on your system (shipped by all major Linux distributions).

Then, to install it:

    pip install preservedfs

Example

An example is given in the repository under the example folder.

Running PreservedFS example

PreservedFS comes with a Command Line Interface (CLI). So once installed, you can run:

preservedfs ~/preservedfs/example/target ~/preservedfs/example/mnt ~/preservedfs/example/local

Using PreservedFS example

You can then browse to the example/mnt folder which is the folder mounted by PreservedFS.

You will see a union of the content of the folders example/target and example/local.

If you modify a file within the example/mnt folder (such as this one EXAMPLE.org), the changes will be written in example/local and reflected in example/mnt but the original file will be preserved!

You can play around by creating / deleting files in example/mnt and see how it affects the folders example/local and example/target.