As a result of our polling, our project will be the "Echo Backup". If a problem is identified and we cannot work around the problem with a unique solution, then our second project choice is "Efficient Customer Rewards Program". Our team is currently researching "Echo Backup".

Problem Statement
Hard drives failures results in catastrophic data loss and a backup solution that takes advantage of network resources is needed.

Problem Characteristics:
Hard disk failure has many causes:

• Physical stress such as dropping a laptop or vibration
• Mother nature (lighting, fire, water damage, etc.)
• Dust or other factors leading to excessive heat buildup
• Multiple power cycles
• Old age
• Misuse; i.e. consumer drive in enterprise environment
• Overclocking and other user error

Recovery involves:

• Lots of time to make a drive identical to a failed drive
• Copy of files used for restoring can be a little out of date
• Not always quick to bring an older copy of a file update manually
• System paths can be different between OS

Solution statement
Design software which makes use of existing network infrastructure and provides an efficient and scalable P2P approach to creating and managing network backups.

Solution Characteristics:

• No additional hardware required
• No single point of failure
• Fully automated; no regular intervention required
• Centrally managed using a simple GUI
• Does not require Internet or WAN access
• No monthly fee

Customer
Personal PC users, enthusiasts, small businesses and organizations, anyone that has multiple networked storage devices with data to be backed-up.

Competition
Many online companies offer backup services for large volume customers such as large corporations. There are also plenty of companies that will backup anyone’s data online such as Amazon S3. Please visit the competition matrix tab to see how Echo Backup stacks up.

Statistics
Typical failure rates of five-year-old hard disks is 6-10% per year. Without regard to age, hard drives fail at an average rate of 2-4% per year. This is in stark contrast to the

References

1. http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/Hard-Disk-MTBF-Flap-or-Farce/
2. http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/rese...
3. http://db.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/index.html
4. Lazarus Boone, Sys Admin at ODUCS
5. http://users.iafrica.com/c/cq/cquirke/baddata.htm