Backup for the Personal Terabyte
Student: Zack Kurmas
Protecting File Systems: A Survey
of Backup Techniques
Proceedings Joint NASA and IEEE
Mass Storage Conference, March 1998.
To provide high availability, the Personal Terabyte will include disk
array redundancy techniques. These features will protect the array
from disk, power-supply or other component failures.
A
common use of backups is to restore individual files that were
accidentally deleted by a user. Keeping file system snapshots on-line
can eliminate the need to use traditional backups for this purpose.
However, backups will still be required to protect against site
disasters such as earthquakes or fires. Traditional backups are
likely to become more difficult over time, as disk capacities increase
at a higher rate (60% per year) than disk bandwidth (40% per year).
Over time, it will take increasingly long to read the entire contents
of a disk. Traditional full backups supplemented by frequent
incremental backups are likely to become unworkable.
We are evaluating the use of innovative backup techniques. In a
recent paper published in the Joint NASA and IEEE Mass Storage
Conference, we surveyed and classified existing backup techniques and
identified desriable characteristics for backup in the Personal
Terabyte system: