Native support for WebDAV?

[booBot]

As I've asked on the now-nonexistent forum and on TC.ch one - would it be useful to implement a native WebDAV support so that this program will be able to save traffic while accessing containers located at a WebDAV storage?

Yes, I clearly understand this would impede (or even completely negate) Plausible Deniability through a hidden volume.
(An adversary will clearly see which parts of a container were accessed and when)

Nevertheless, if a user would want to not have a local copy of his data, if he is ready to only have access to it while on-line - the following could save a lot of traffic to read/write data from/to a container.

1) WebDAV has a notion of a collection which is a folder in a local file system, but a modified program will handle it as a container name;
2) within such a collection it will create lots of 512-bytes-(or 4k)-long files to keep a blob of encrypted user's data in each;
3) names of those files would correspond to a sector number were it a local HDD, i.e. represent an offset within a container;
4) when mounted, such a collection will constitute a file system for the OS as usual.

Please comment.

[WaywardGeek]

If you mount your webdav directory as a disk on a Mac, wont that let you use TrueCrypt to access your data there? Here's one product that let's you use Finder to open a webdav directory:

http://www.seapine.com/kb/questions/118 ... S+X+Finder

Wouldn't it make more sense to have a FOSS version of that than to integrate webdav support into all the programs on your Mac that are file based?

[booBot]

The problem with the WebDAV as it is - the whole file (of a container) is always downloaded/uploaded in its' entirety no matter how small the actual change was in its' contents.

Yes, as of today I'm able to first map a WebDAV storage as a networked disk, point TC to a container file on that disk, and mount that container.
However, due to the above-mentioned limitation it is not very practical. Works (in a sensible way traffic-wise) only for small containers. Having something larger than, say, 256MB containers is a waste of time and traffic.

I look for having 4GB containers on WebDAV storages.

PS
Reading an article at your link gives me such
Notes
Some file editors create temporary files to save your data then try to overwrite the existing file with the temporary file. Surround SCM does not support this functionality. To edit files using WebDAV, copy the file to a local directory, edit the file, then copy the file back in to the WebDAV directory.

My opinion is: as of now, WebDAV is aimed at [l]users sharing their kitten photos. For anything really serious the OS-built-in support for off-site storages is inadequate.