A Filesystem using Amazon S3

We propose a system that uses cloud storage as an hourly back-up system while providing a fully featured filesystem for distributed storage. We mount a fully featured filesystem stored in the cloud to a local server and take advantage of a very large local server cache so that we can have similar performance to a central local server while having the reliability of a cloud system. We use a modified version of an Amazon S3 filesystem called S3QL to remotely mount a fully featured filesystem to a local server and then use AFS to publish the filesystem to desktop clients. Using this system, we take advantage of the fact that upload costs to Amazon S3 is very small and show that initial costs as well monthly costs of this system is reasonable.