Zip Zap Data—A Framework for ‘Personal Data Preservation’

Abstract

In the era of Mobile devices, a huge volume of mobile applications produces vast and variety of data in their own formats. There is every chance that most of these data will be lost or gone forever. Let us explain how, technically any digital data becomes irretrievable if there is a change of data format or a change in application interpreting it or a change in platform feature used by the application and your app did not change to accommodate it. In simple terms, if you try to upgrade your mobile—there are a lot of possibilities that data from your previous mobile could be lost forever. Reason for loss could be your newer device comes with some obsolete platform features and hence some of your applications no longer run in the new device as developer decided to discontinue that app. Even more pressing issue is there is no way to transfer application data from old to a new device and this is very common with mobile apps. The root cause for this is the lack of backup and retrieval mechanisms in devices and applications. We studied various approaches and research works related to this problem and proposed ‘Zip Zap Data’, a framework for effective backup and recovery of personal digital data.