Efficient Metadata Management in Block-Level CDP System for Cyber Security

Continuous Data Protection (CDP) is an emerging scheme of data backup and recovery for Cyber Security. Compared with traditional data protection techniques, it can provide much higher reliability and allow the data state to be reverted to any point-in-time in the past. CDP continuously captures and logs every disk update, producing large amount of information, thus desperately requires an efficient mechanism of organizing such information (about the disk I/Os) in order to guarantee the performance to be acceptable. However, there are few works which address the organization of history data to improve the recovery efficiency in case of the disaster occurrences. In this paper, three methods of metadata management for Cyber Security are presented, of which two are simple implementations based on MySQL database (named DIRMySQL and OPTMySQL respectively) and the other one is designed with consideration of its characteristics. Experimental results show that METACDP method is far more efficient than the other two and its performance is reasonably acceptable. Furthermore, we discuss in-depth two recovery algorithms, which are full-recovery and incremental recovery. Users can choose the optimal recovery algorithm based on the required recovery time point.