Data recovery from sudden power-off in mobile devices

Abstract

Mobile devices always have risk of unexpected battery component separation. In this paper, we present Difference Ratio-based Logging, a data recovery technology to prevent data loss in the volatile memory (DRAM) write buffer from sudden power-off. The proposed scheme can recover up-to-date user data in the buffer by using either two flash memory pages-sized NVRAM or small capacitor that sustains for flushing two pages of data in DRAM to flash memory. Our simulation study shows that the proposed scheme can provide recoverability of buffered data from sudden power-off with reasonable performance degradation compared with non-volatile memory-based write buffer.