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.

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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 Senior Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat (Raanana, Israel)
3 Josef "Jeff" Sipek BS Jul 2005 - May 2008 Senior Member of Technical Staff, VMware (Boston, MA)