An Incremental Snapshot System using Smart Backup for Persistent Disks in Cloud

Abstract

Periodical snapshots also called persistent disk snapshots are an essential feature associated with every cloud-hosted virtual instance, which minimizes the risk of unexpected data loss in the server and unavailability issues. The conventional method of creating a snapshot of a production-level server is done by temporarily disabling write access to data during the backup, either by stopping the accessing applications or by using the locking API provided by the operating system to enforce exclusive read access. This is not tolerable for high-availability always-online systems, in which service stoppages are not bearable. In order to solve this downtime issue in high-availability systems, the backup can be performed in a smarter way as incremental snapshots in which a read-only copy of the dataset frozen at a point in time is stored as snapshot by allowing applications to continue processing and writing their data to the instance. Also, incremental snapshots work in a way that only blocks which are different from the former snapshots are processed and stored in the subsequent one.This smart backup will reduce the overall space requirement of the snapshot system by storing only the differences in file storage blocks. Also, when implemented this will save energy and infrastructure requirements of the cloud provider as well as the cost and time of the end-user to create a low- latency server.