A Network Differential Backup and Restore System based on a Novel Duplicate Data Detection algorithm

The ever-growing volume and value of data has raised increasing pressure for long-term data protection in storage systems. Moreover, the redundancy in data further aggravates such pressure in these systems. It has become a serious problem to protect data while eliminating data redundancy, saving storage space and network bandwidth as well. Data deduplication techniques greatly optimize storage systems through eliminating or reducing redundant data in these systems. As an improved duplicate data detection algorithm, SBBS (a sliding blocking algorithm with backtracking sub-blocks) enhances duplicate detection precision through attempting to backtrack the left/right quarter and half sub-blocks of matching-failed segments. Based on the SBBS algorithm, this paper designs and implements a network differential backup and restore system. It designs the structures of full and differential backup images. In addition, in order to fulfill the communication requirements of backup/restore on the Internet, this paper designs a protocol in Application Layer, referred as NBR (Network Backup and Restore Protocol). The experimental results show that, for three typical files, the designed backup and restore system respectively saves 9.7%, 11%, and 4.5% storage space compared with a differential backup system based on the traditional sliding blocking (TSB) algorithm. Key-Words: Full backup; Differential backup; Duplicate data detection; Sliding blocking algorithm; Matching-failed segment; NBR