Personal Cloud Filesystem: A distributed unification filesystem for personal computer and portable device

Abstract

This paper describes Personal Cloud Filesystem, a modular userspace filesystem framework for accessing and manipulating data on multiple remote computers or mobile devices. One of its novelty is that it uses mechanisms similar to those employed by unification filesystem to present a unified view of files and folders from remote machines to user. This allows data from multiple remote sources to appear as if they reside together locally in the filesystem's mount point. It also supports offline operation by automatically caches frequently use data for offline usage. Benchmark results from prototype have shown acceptable performance, despite the increased overhead.