Chunnel (Access and Recover Your Data Anywhere)

Background:

Many people struggle to keep up-to-date backups of their files and end up losing several days, months or even years of data when a hard drive fails on their personal or work computer. Some of the most vulnerable people are sales representatives or contractors that must travel around the country and do not have corporate backup scripts running regularly. These sales representatives end up saving files to their personal computers that do not have automated backups and redundant storage.

Problem Statement:

Currently, there is no software that watches changes in directories and synchronizes user profile data, documents, pictures and other files securely on a LAN and over the Internet to a corporate or personal server. This software will allow users to work on many different computers, locally modifying files and automatically distributing changes on computers in disparate locations. This ability will allow users to quickly become effective on any computer, while backing up data immediately upon connection to an Internet source. If a user is connected to the Internet his/her files and profile will be updated as changes are saved.

The client software will run on Microsoft Windows XP and major distributions of Linux. The server software will only be supported on Linux and will automatically configure backups on tape or DVD.

Team Members:

• Joseph McAtee (Computer Engineer):joe.mcatee@gmail.com
• Bryan Rengering (Computer Engineer):bryan.rengering@gmail.com
• Brian Ulm (Computer Engineer): ulmbj1@gmail.com

Faculty Advisor:

Philip Wilsey

Goal:

Our goal is to design, develop and implement backup software that runs in the background and will preserve the work and profile of individual users to a central location.

Subgoals:

1. Develop a user friendly and intuitive client-side interface to interact with the server software.

2. Dvelop a server-side software solution to automatically configure backups to tape and DVD media.

3. Develop a method of keeping track of which files/folders/bookmarks a user chooses to synchronize with the remote location and determine if they need to be updated. This will be determined by using the file-system change events from the operating system and then comparing the local file to the remote location.

Helpful Skills:

• Computer Programming (C++, C#, Java, HTML, UNIX Shell, Perl)

• Database (SQL Scripting, Oracle 8i / 9i / 10i, Mysql 5.x.x, Access)

• Operating Systems (Microsoft Windows and major Linux operating systems)

• Project Management (Johnson & Johnson, Proctor & Gamble, United States Air Force)