Shared Backup & Restore: Save, Recover and Share Personal Information into Closed Groups of Smartphones

While many solutions for making backups and restoring data are known for servers and desktops, mobile devices pose several challenges, mainly due to the plethora of devices, vendors, operating systems and versions available in the mobile market. In this paper, we introduce a new backup and restore approach for mobile devices, which helps to reduce the effort in saving and restoring personal data. Our approach is platform independent: in particular, we present two prototypes based on two different mobile operating systems: Google Android and Symbian S60. Another feature of our approach lies in the capability of sharing information in mobile devices among a group of selected persons. This can be useful in many situations e.g., in creating a mobile business network among a group of people.