I have recently come across a pretty nifty Linux utility that allows me to mount a remote filesystem on an SSH server, locally and without requiring root privileges to do so. The remote filesystem happens to be where my backups are located, so that’s going to be useful for making and restoring backups!

The utility I’ve discovered is called sshfs and is a FUSE file system whereby a normal, non-root user, can mount the remote folder and see the contents as if they were actually in a local folder.

Once mounted in this way, the remote files can be copied to, from, deleted etc in the normal manner.

Installation

On my Linux Mint 18.2 setup, it’s a simple one liner:

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sudo apt-get install sshfs

Usage

First, create the folder where my remote files will appear. I’m calling mine sshfiles:

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mkdir ./sshfiles

Then mount the remote folder on to the new sshfiles folder. The backup files live in the norman/backups folder, on a server named wd and the user account I need to login to is my own, norman:

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sshfs norman@wd:norman/backups ./sshfiles

Now, if I do a quick check, I see the following:

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ls ./sshfiles

Backup\_scripts  Downloads       Records         data            
Calibre         Home            SourceCode              

It’s looking good. Now I can copy my local folders to the backup device by copying them locally to the sshfiles folder. The sshfs utility will do the needful in copying them across the network to the correct server.

Once my backups (or restores) are completed, I can unmount the sshfiles folder as follows:

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fusermount -u ./sshfiles