PSCloud: a durable context-aware personal storage cloud

Abstract

Personal content from mobile devices is often irreplaceable, yet current solutions for managing and synchronizing this data across multiple devices to ensure durability are often limited. A common approach is to synchronize data through a cloud storage service such as Dropbox. We argue that this model is excessively rigid because it forces users to use more expensive cloud storage than is needed. This paper proposes an alternative approach that uses storage on all of a user's mobile devices, home servers, and cloud storage accounts to create a single unified personal storage system called PSCloud in which data is automatically cached, replicated, and placed to enable reliable access across all devices while minimizing network access and storage costs. This approach is based on a per-device network context-graph that tracks connectivity relationships between a user's devices and storage options over time. Preliminary experiments show that combining such context with techniques that exploit content similarity across devices to make placement decisions can lead to substantial reductions in cloud storage and network usage.