Understanding storage requirement for amazon s3 using fuse-s3fs

Question

I got a question to understand the mount process of Amazon s3 service suing fuse-s3fs, when i mount amazon s3 service bucket, does it copies whole data to my local system or it will just act as view of amazon s3 bucket?

The reason why i want to know is, let say i got a system with 500 MB storage space, can I mount a bucket with data for around 200 GB? If it just act as view then i should, but if whole data is copied locally then certainly not.

I need guidance in this regard.

Thanks.

Answer 1

By default (i.e. without using caching option), s3fs does nothing more than provide a mount point for your S3 bucket. There will be no local data copies retained. s3fs does however provide an option to utilize a local drive as a cache, which can provide some i/o performance improvements in cases where they are needed (as direct read/write to S3 bucket via the mount is not the quickest process).