An online backup system should be quick and reliable in both saving and restoring users' data. To do so in a peer-to-peer implementation, data transfer scheduling and the amount of redundancy must be chosen wisely. We formalize the problem of exchanging multiple pieces of data with intermittently available peers, and we show that random scheduling completes transfers nearly optimally in terms of duration as long as the system is sufficiently large. Moreover, we propose an adaptive redundancy scheme that improves performance and decreases resource usage while keeping the risks of data loss low. Extensive simulations show that our techniques are effective in a realistic trace-driven scenario with heterogeneous bandwidth.
Backup objects, whose confidentiality can be ensured by standard encryption techniques, should encode incremental differences between archive versions. Recently, various techniques have been proposed to optimize computational time and size of these differences @cite_3 .
@cite_3
2040193872
When persistent storage fails, traditional media recovery first restores an old backup image followed by replaying the recovery log since the last backup operation. Restoring a backup can take hours, but log replay often takes much longer due to its random access pattern. We introduce single-pass restore, a technique in which restoration of all backups and log replay are performed in a single operation. This allows hiding log replay within the initial restore of the backup, thus substantially reducing the time and cost of media recovery and, incidentally, rendering incremental backup techniques unnecessary. Single-pass restore is enabled by a new organization of the log archive, created by a continuous process that is easily incorporated into the traditional log archiving process. Our empirical analysis shows that the imposed overhead is negligible in comparison with the substantial benefits provided.