HVF: An optimized data backup and recovery system for hard disk based consumer electronics

Hard disks are employed as the primary storage device for consumer electronic products. But the data on hard disks may be lost due to error operations, malicious code attacks and software conflictions. As data backup and recovery on hard disks move to ever more challenging areas, improving the security level of backup data, lowering overhead to the storage system and reducing the fragments created by the backup operation become increasingly important. Therefore, a novel Host Protected Area Virtual File System prototype, which is called as HVF, is presented in this paper. In order to boost security of data store locations, backup data or protected data are saved in Host Protected Area by the storage filter driver. The method of creating bitmap indexes for hard disks and the mechanism of the mapping relationship are proposed in order to reduce the effects to the operating system and cut down the fragments produced by a large number of I/O operations. The simulation results indicate that the proposed HVF has higher security, less overhead and fragments to dominating operating systems.