sbmt

Plexdrive, Rclone and UnionFS mount management made easier.

Overview

The Seedbox Mount Tool (sbmt) is a single binary intended to help ensure the integrity of Plexdrive, Rclone and UnionFS mounts on a seedbox and synchronise data between local and cloud storage.

This project takes heavy inspiration from work already done by Mads Lundt, Jamie and all the contributors over at hoarding.me and the various scripts and tips I found posted on the PlexACD subreddit.

With sbmt I am trying to hit the sweet spot between the approach of Dockerising everything and maintaining an array of bash scripts to enable the smooth running of a seedbox running Plex and the seamless synchronisation of local and remotely stored media. An additional consideration that has had a big influence on the direction of sbmt is the desire to easily be able to switch from one seedbox to another and get up and running again as quickly as possible.

With a single binary managing mounting and ensuring mount integrity, dealing with synchronising of local and remote data as well as ensuring any required cleanups of local and remote data, cron jobs can be copied easily from one seedbox to another, either maintaining an old folder structure or implementing a new folder structure just by changing the flags passed to different commands.

Installation

The latest version of bfm can be installed using go get.

go get -u github.com/LGUG2Z/sbmt

Make sure $GOPATH is set correctly that and that $GOPATH/bin is in your $PATH.

The sbmt executable will be installed under the $GOPATH/bin directory.

Prior Setup

Before scheduling sbmt commands to be run on a seedbox, there are some pieces of prior setup required:

1. Create an unencrypted remote for Google Drive using Rclone. Files uploaded to this remote will be stored unencrypted.
2. Create an encrypted remote for Google Drive using Rclone. Files uploaded to this remote will be stored encrypted.
3. Configure Plexdrive to be able to access your Google Drive account. Encrypted files viewed on this mount remain encrypted.
4. Create a remote to decrypt the encrypted files mounted by Plexdrive. Encrypted files viewed on this mount will be shown in their unencrypted form.

Usage

The three commands of sbmt are mount, upload and cleanup.

mount

The encrypted remote files on Google Drive are mounted by Plexdrive in the folder specified using the --plexdrive flag. A local Rclone mount then reads the encrypted files in the plexdrive folder and shows their unencrypted representation in the folder specified using the --decrypt flag. A UnionFS mount is then created at the location specified by the --union flag, which shows a unified representation of all of the files stored in Google Drive (in their unencrypted form, in the --decrypt location), and files that have been downloaded to the local machine, in a folder specified using the --local flag.

The flow of data is as follows:

GDrive (enc) -> Plexdrive (enc) -> Rclone (dec) -> UnionFS (dec).

In order to show an unencrypted representation of the data mounted by Plexdrive, a separate Rclone remote will have to be created, in which the remote location is set to the local folder where Plexdrive will be mounted. The encryption type and the encryption passwords should be the same as those set for the encrypted Google Drive remote. The name of this remote must be passed to the mount command using the --decrypt-remote flag.

If the mount command is run and all mounts are intact, no further action will be taken. Conversely, if any single mount is broken, every mount will be unmounted and remounted to re-establish mount integrity.

Example:

sbmt mount \
    --plexdrive /plexdrive \
    --decrypt-remote plexdrive-decryptor: \
    --decrypt /decrypt \
    --local /local \
    --union /union

cleanup

Files deleted from read-only section of a UnionFS mount are not actually deleted but rather hidden from view. A record of these hidden files is kept in a hidden subfolder of the unionfs mount location (.unionfs). The cleanup command will iterate through all the files of this hidden subfolder, find the corresponding files in the location identified using the --decrypt flag and remove them from Google Drive.

Example:

sbmt cleanup --decrypt /decrypt --union /union

upload

Files created in the read-write section of a UnionFS mount will be iterated over, encrypted, and uploaded to the Rclone remote specified using the --encrypt-remote flag.

The upload command uses the rclone moveto command, which ensures that the file to be uploaded will automatically be removed from the local read-write folder as soon as the upload is confirmed as having been successful.

Example:

sbmt upload --local /local --encrypt-remote encrypted-remote:

unmount

The mounts are unmounted in the following order to ensure that there are no problems with busy resources that prevent a successful unmounting operation:

UnionFS -> Rclone -> Plexdrive

Example:

sbmt unmount --union /union --decrypt /decrypt --plexdrive /plexdrive