Please add info about object mount without demo

[YuriyGavrilov]

Hi I don't understood do I need to buy it or not.

Why I always see book meeting?

[AlexeyALeonov]

To propose a best offering for your use case, but you can read about Object Mount here: https://storj.dev/object-mount

[YuriyGavrilov]

@AlexeyALeonov I just thought on a second that it is ready for home use 😃 to mount and make Time Machine backup. My hopes are dashed by harsh reality 🫠

[AlexeyALeonov]

The native macOS version is in beta, so you may participate too, you may also try to use Mountain Duck or rclone and its rclone mount command. rclone sync should work too, but requires to use a local storage for backup first.

[AlexeyALeonov]

We added a Video demo: https://storj.dev/object-mount/media-workflows#object-mount-demo

@YuriyGavrilov Did it help?

[YuriyGavrilov]

@AlexeyALeonov that's fantastic! 🙏 thx

I also test rclone mount and it's work nice. I think this case could be closed.

By the way do I can use gateway same way like object mount? Or maybe this buckets have some different settings behind?

I think yes, but just asking to avoid opacity, nevertheless I will try :)

[AlexeyALeonov]

Object Mount can be used with any S3-compatible providers, of course it can work with Storj Gateway-MT too, you need to provide the Access Key, the Secret Key and the Endpoint.

Gateway-MT is an Storj-hosted S3-compatible Gateway, which allows you to use the Storj network without using of a native p2p protocol, which need to be supported in the selected tool, S3 is a wide-known standard, so it allows to use almost any S3-compatible tools without modification. The downside of using our S3-compatible gateway instead of a Storj native connection - the Storj-hosted S3-compatible Gateway uses a server-side encryption, unlike the Storj native protocol with the end-to-end encryption.

There is also a Self-hosted S3-compatible Gateway, which allows you to take best from both worlds - the S3-compatibility and end-to-end encryption, but you need to host it in your own trusted infrastructure.

Gateways are not a replacement for Object Mount, it's needed to provide an S3 Gateway to the Storj network, which doesn't use S3 protocol internally, Storj Distributed Cloud Storage is a completely different storage solution - your data is stored on thousands independent nodes across the world, not in a few datacenters like others, thus it's faster than anyone, see https://www.storj.io/object-storage/performance and more robust than anyone - because there is no one point of failure.

There are many alternatives for Object Mount, like rclone, which also can be configured not only using S3 protocol, but also the Storj native protocol, it's fastest of other solutions like Mountain Duck, but it's slower than Object Mount and not fully POSIX-compatible, which is required to work with files in the bucket as with a local files. Just for backup purposes it would work too, but it cannot cover all use cases though. You may check out other backups solutions, which can work with Storj directly.

So, I believe you mean something different.

[YuriyGavrilov]

@AlexeyALeonov wow that's nice. I missed all of those tools. thx 🙏

Tried native rclone seems to be nice. but receive frozen rclone process ones time.

(base) yuriygavrilov@MacBookPro rclone-v1.70.2-osx-amd64 % ./rclone mount waterbear:rclone/my-data-bucket /Users/yuriygavrilov/Drive --allow-other --vfs-cache-mode writes
2025/07/04 22:06:21 CRITICAL: Fatal error: failed to mount FUSE fs: "/Users/yuriygavrilov/Drive" is not empty, use --allow-non-empty to mount anyway
(base) yuriygavrilov@MacBookPro rclone-v1.70.2-osx-amd64 % ls /Users/yuriygavrilov/Drive
(base) yuriygavrilov@MacBookPro rclone-v1.70.2-osx-amd64 % 

so it is not ideal, but any way it it good. I think this is due to FUSE and maybe some dependency or behavior of my testing.

new try

super fast uploaded 2 large files

ctrl+c and ... but ctrl+c works with s3 mount.

(base) yuriygavrilov@MacBookPro rclone-v1.70.2-osx-amd64 % ./rclone mount waterbear:rclone/my-data-bucket /Users/yuriygavrilov/Drive1 --allow-other --vfs-cache-mode writes
^C2025/07/04 22:14:59 ERROR : /Users/yuriygavrilov/Drive1: Unmounted rclone mount

now I think it will be same. folder not empty and etc.

may be need to use eject drive to properly unmount folder.

5 min later it unfreeze

and now the same

(base) yuriygavrilov@MacBookPro rclone-v1.70.2-osx-amd64 % ./rclone mount waterbear:rclone/my-data-bucket /Users/yuriygavrilov/Drive1 --allow-other --vfs-cache-mode writes
2025/07/04 22:44:17 CRITICAL: Fatal error: failed to mount FUSE fs: "/Users/yuriygavrilov/Drive1" is not empty, use --allow-non-empty to mount anyway

Same size: this is .DS_Store some fancy Mac OS files which always annoying in archives :)

so at the end Drive eject working fine.

[AlexeyALeonov]

Freeze is related to the used cache - rclone uploads the data locally, then transfer it in a background, which obviously could be slower than the local copy, unless you have an upstream internet bandwidth more than 10Gbit. By the way, if your upstream bandwidth is less than 1Gbit, S3 protocol likely would be faster for uploads, but slower than downloads in comparison with the native Storj protocol, see https://storj.dev/dcs/third-party-tools/file-transfer-performance

Regarding "is not empty" error you may add the suggested flag --allow-non-empty to the command.

Of course Object Mount just works and works fast without using any tricks like a local cache, which may give you an impression, that rclone mount --vfs-cache-mode write is fast. But rclone mount cannot emulate the filesystem properly without using the cache, the object storage is not a filesystem, so it doesn't allow modifications in place (you need to download the object, modify it and upload back), and doesn't support the file locks (it's not the same as an Object Lock) or empty folders or permissions or any other POSIX functions. Thus tools uses emulation as best as they can. Object Mount is a best of them, you even can edit a video without downloading GBs of the file.