Design and Implementation of a Secure File Synchronization and Backup System

Abstract

As the daily business operation of enterprises gradually rely on information systems, the applications of common enterprise storage proliferate rapidly, which caused the demands of a secure management solution for backing up useful files. One of the surveys in IDC regarding “Asia/Pacific Semiannual Storage Software Tracker, H1 2004” has pointed out that on the first half of the year in 2004, the growing of the market in Taiwan for storage management solution has been lifted up to 52%, when comparing to the same period of last year. The growth mainly comes from the market of storage management software. However, the commonly used backup mechanism for most of the enterprises still needs to be accomplished by shutting down systems with image mirroring management. They rarely adopt on-line and real-time approaches to backup files directly. In this paper, we propose a solid system design on top of the popular NTFS file system, to practically implement a backup environment for critical files. Besides, we have implemented a practical and secure file backing up system, which backs up monitored files or irectories with encryption to a dedicated destination. According to our experiment, the result shows that the system can safely back up files without loss by using only ordinary personal computers, when the monitored files are less than 500. That makes our system a very practical and feasible solution for most of the small and middle enterprises in Taiwan.