Tuxera Keeps Your Data Safe When Power is Lost
April 24, 2024
News
“If a vehicle crashes while it is recording video on a dashboard camera, a resulting power loss can cause the loss of the last 30 seconds or more of the recording,” said Teemu Sivonen, Product Manager at Tuxera. Tuxera released an innovative data resilience and fail-safety feature for embedded systems developers, its hardware cost-friendly Tuxera Persistence Manager.
The solution is a premium add-on feature for its industrial exFAT file system implementation, Microsoft exFAT by Tuxera.It is ideal for designers working with Linux-based data recorders in applications such as automotive, industrial, consumer electronics, and commercial drones.
“Normally, recording devices save data to volatile memory,” said Sivonen, “If the device abruptly loses power, such as from being unplugged or from a hardware defect, the data in the process of being recorded has not had time to flush to disk and is lost forever.”
In use cases where constant recording is required and data needs to be saved and available, the platform captures critical data through video and leveraging it to make informed decisions1. Persistence Manager enables system designers to control, using the software, the amount of data written and the amount of time it takes to cache before it is sent to storage media.
Super- or ultra-capacitors are generally utilized to provide a small amount of power during power-loss situations enabling data flush if needed. The main drawback is that supercapacitors can be expensive2 contingent on capacity, voltage, and other special requirements.
The dependency on supercapacitors to provide power-fail safety and prevent data loss can be optimized using Persistence Manager. The software allows for customization to determine the data to flush and when to flush it, ensuring data is securely collected if there is a power crash or loss. Tuxera’s exFAT features patented distribution methods that improve the problem of early flash burnout while working with Tuxera Persistence Manager.
Sivonen ends, “Tuxera Persistence Manager ensures that if the recording device unexpectedly loses power, as much data as possible is saved and committed to storage. The user can adjust the software’s settings to control how often the device flushes data to the disk, minimizing both the size of supercapacitor required and the amount of data at risk.”
For more information, visit tuxera.com.
1Devices like digital video recorders (DVRs) and dashcams for cars, industrial-grade cameras used in security or vision systems, and commercial drones collecting data about the environment are possible target devices for this innovation.
2 Based on a real customer scenario in an automotive DVR system, the cost can range up to 4 USD or more per supercapacitor. Additionally, hardware components are subject to supply chain changes and vulnerability, and thus can delay a product going to market according to required product roadmaps.
Chad Cox. Production Editor, Embedded Computing Design, has responsibilities that include handling the news cycle, newsletters, social media, and advertising. Chad graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a B.A. in Cultural and Analytical Literature.
