Design and Evaluation of a Provenance-Based Rebuild Framework

Previous storage reliability solutions mainly include log files, snapshot, backup or ECC-based schemes. These technologies focus more on the whole disk or system reliability, but not single data object. However, it is not efficient to rebuild a file by recovering a whole system using the technologies above. In this paper, we propose to use provenance, the origin or history of objects, to rebuild damaged or lost files. Provenance-based rebuild can exactly reconstruct the right file lost or damaged by backtracking its generation process in the past. The evaluation results show that provenance-based rebuild performs significantly better than log-based technology with reasonable time and space overhead.