Development of personal cloud file system framework for portable devices

Abstract

To describe personal cloud file system framework, a modular userspace file system framework for accessing and manipulating data on multiple personal computers and portable devices. One of personal cloud file system framework's unique characteristic that distinguishes it from other distributed file systems is the way it presents local and remote files and folders to the user. Personal cloud file system framework uses mechanisms similar to those employed by various unification file systems to present a virtually unified view of remote files and folders to the user. From the user's perspective, both local and remote files and folders from different machines appear as if they reside together locally in the Personal Cloud File System Framework's mount point. Personal cloud file system framework is also designed to support disconnected operation. When used, files are cached for offline usage automatically. When the cache is full, personal cloud file system framework discards files using a replacement policy specified by the user. Personal cloud file system framework also implements branch tag, an extension of the fundamental concepts of unification file systems that enables the user to directly specify a file to operate on using the branch's name as well as shows files and folders that have been hidden by the framework during the process of unifying contents of multiple directories. Also, the modular nature of personal cloud file system framework makes it trivial to modify or extend the framework via IO module. Simple protocol agnostic file system 2 (SPAFS2), a prototype of personal cloud file system framework, have been implemented on Linux operating system and preliminary benchmark results have shown that the prototype's performance is equal to and in some cases surpass other file systems that are less complex and have less features than SPAFS2.