Cumulus

Abstract

Cumulus is a system for efficiently implementing filesystem backups over the Internet, specifically designed under a thin cloud assumption—that the remote datacenter storing the backups does not provide any special backup services, but only a least-common-denominator storage interface. Cumulus aggregates data from small files for storage and uses LFS-inspired segment cleaning to maintain storage efficiency. While Cumulus can use virtually any storage service, we show its efficiency is comparable to integrated approaches.