Using Free Web Storage For Data Backup

Backing up important data is crucial. A variety of causes can lead to data loss, such as disk failures, administration errors, virus infiltration, theft, and physical damage to equipment. Users and businesses have important information that is difficult to replace, such as financial records and contacts. Reliable backups are crucial because some data cannot be replaced, while recreating other data can be expensive in terms of time and money. We have created two methods which leverage various types of free Web storage to provide simple, reliable, and free backup solutions. The first method is based on the storage of data in the caches of Internet search engines. We have developed CrawlBackup, a tool which prepares and provides the data for Web crawlers and can then restore the data from the Internet even if all the data on the original computer is unavailable. The second method, called MailBackup, stores redundant copies of the important data in the mailboxes of Internet mail services.

Download software.

Conference and Workshop Papers:

#	Title (click for html version)	Formats	Published In	Date	Comments
1	Using Free Web Storage for Data Backup	PS PDF BibTeX	Second ACM International Workshop on Storage Security and Survivability (StorageSS 2006) held in conjunction with the 13th ACM CCS.	Oct 2006

Past Students:

#	Name (click for home page)	Program	Period	Current Location
1	Nikolai Joukov	PhD	Jan 2004 - Dec 2006	Research Staff Member, Storage and Data Services Research group, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (Hawthorne, NY)
2	Avishay Traeger	PhD	Sep 2003 - Aug 2008	Research Staff Member, Storage Systems and Performance Management group, IBM Tel Aviv Research Lab (Tel-Aviv, Israel)
3	Josef "Jeff" Sipek	BS	Jul 2005 - May 2008	U.Mich CS Ph.D. program (Ann Arbor, MI)

(Last updated: Mon Sep 8 22:12:39 EDT 2008)