# Experiment with SSHFS

# Motivation

I have been using a [PKM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_knowledge_management) called [Zim Wiki](https://zim-wiki.org/) for a long time now. The thing that I have struggled with Zim Wiki is when I have to work on different devices and I don't have my copy of Zim Wiki.

To be honest Zim Wiki is not all fancy with cloud-sync and multi-device support but following the Unix Philosophy of doing just one thing and doing it well, helps me to organize and retrieve information that is valuable to me.

There was a time when I use to back up my copy of Zim on dropbox. Now, in order to maintain a single source of truth, I use to sync the copy of my Zim notes to dropbox every minute using a cronjob.

The thing that goes wrong is if the cronjob fails for whatever reason, or I shut down the device before cron job and that will land me up in a conflicting situation.

These problems pushed me to come up with a slightly better management system.

# What is sshfs

I didn't know I could mount a filesystem of a VPS on my local system. Previously, I use to use either [scp](https://linux.die.net/man/1/scp) or [rsync](https://linux.die.net/man/1/rsync) to transfer files from and to the remote machine. [SSHFS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSHFS) is a filesystem client that can help to mount files and directories on the remote server to your local machine.

This is a revelation to me because now I can use my remote server as a centralized place to serve my zim-wiki.

# How to achieve sshfs backup

This is very simple, first, we need to install `sshfs` on the local machine.

```
sudo apt install sshfs
```
 Then we need to mount the remote files and directories in a pre-existing directory.

```
sudo sshfs -o nonempty,reconnect,allow_other,default_permissions,IdentityFile=<ssh-private-key> <user>@<hostname>:/path-to-remote /local-path
```

And now we can just `rsync` zim-wiki files by:

```
rsync -avzh ~/zim-notes/notebooks ~/aws-vps/zim-wiki/
```

Make sure that directories are synced. Now just open zim-wiki and add the notebook. :)

And voila!

# Gotchas!

When internet connection goes down, the application will start hanging in that case first we need to kill the `sshfs` process and then unmount the directory.

```
sudo pkill -kill -f "sshfs"
```
And then unmount the directory

```
sudo fusermount -u /home/aws-vps
```
I have tried to accommodate the `erratic` connection in mind and introduce `reconnect` option in sshfs. This arrangement has workout miracles for me in terms of management.