[GRLUG] gmailfs question

[Michael Mol]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 10:50 PM, Bob Kline<bob.kline at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have just over 21,000 messages,
> which is about 3.3GB out of an
> allocated 7.3GB.

I don't know the layout of a mounted gmailfs, but the idea of pulling
a remote directory listing where there might be 21,000 entries scares
me.  Just a local listing of a directory with 17,000 entries is
painful enough on my laptop.

>
> Leading me to ask just what mounting
> does.  If I want to do a backup I presume
> I have to actually make a copy to a local
> directory.  i.e., I've mounted a file system
> on Google's machine.

Mounting a filesystem tells the kernel that, when examining a
particular directory (the particular mount point), it should query a
particular part of the kernel to find out what's in it.  In some
cases, that will be determined by interpreting local hardware.  In
other cases, it might be determined by querying a remote system.  That
latter case *doesn't* mean the remote data is automatically copied to
the local one; It's rather like network drives on Windows.

Let's say you mounted your gmail account at /mnt/gmail/.  You can
access your data by browsing /mnt/gmail/ and its subdirectories, but
as soon as your network connection drops, you won't be able to get
anything more from it.

You could, however, run a command like cp -a /mnt/gmail/*
~/some_dir_I_created_to_back_up_my_home_directory/.


>
> Re POP,  I'm game,  but will have to ask
> you for a small word salad about how to
> do it....

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34030

>
> Re FUSE,  the man page for mount.gmailfs
> does mention that the kernel must support
> the FUSE file system.

That's because FUSE is the kernel module the system will reference to
find out what's in the mount.  There's a userspace program that FUSE,
in turn, queries, in order to get answers.

-- 
:wq