Combining Mobile and Cloud Storage for Providing Ubiquitous Data Access

Users increasingly own, and use, multiple computing devices. To be able to access their personal data, at any time and in any device, users usually need to create replicas in each device. Managing these multiple replicas becomes an important issue. In this paper we present the FEW Phone File System, a data management system that combines mobile and cloud storage for providing ubiquitous data access. To this end, our system takes advantage of the characteristics of mobile phones for storing a replica of a user's personal data, thus allowing these devices to be used as personal and portable file servers. As users tend to always carry their mobile phone with them at all times, these replicas are the basis for providing high data availability, and keeping replicas automatically synchronized. Our system also uses other replicas located in web servers and cloud storage systems, to reduce the volume of data stored, and transferred to/from mobile phones, by maintaining only the information needed to obtain them.