VerFAT: A Transparent and Efficient Multi-versioning Mechanism for FAT File System

Ensuring data reliability and continuity has played an important role for ensuring the information system still working normally when suffering from attack or other abnormal events. The existing data protection technologies are difficult to meet the fine-grained and precise data protection requirements on the widely used Windows platform. Inspiring from the data organization in the FAT file system, dedicating to reduce the number of direct disk write requests, we have designed a transparent and efficient multi-versioning mechanism for FAT file system, named VerFAT. During the data backup generation, responding to each file updating request, VerFAT generates multi-versioning data blocks. While we have achieved the goal of greatly improving the efficiency of data failure recovery by modifying the linking relationship of data blocks in FAT Table, merging the separate disk write operations on FAT Table and merging the separate disk write operations on directory entry when recovery a protected directory. Also we present the theoretical analysis for failure recovery mechanism in VerFAT. The experiment results on the prototype system have proved that our design is reasonable and efficient.