A mobile computing system is a distributed system in which at least one of the processes is mobile. They are constrained by lack of stable storage, low network bandwidth, mobility, frequent disconnection and limited battery life. Checkpointing is one of the commonly used techniques to provide fault tolerance in mobile computing environment. In order to suit the mobile environment a distance based recovery scheme is proposed which is based on checkpointing and message logging. After the system recovers from failures, only the failed processes rollback and restart from their respective recent checkpoints, independent of the others. The salient feature of this scheme is to reduce the transfer and recovery cost. While the mobile host moves with in a specific range, recovery information is not moved and thus only be transferred nearby if the mobile host moves out of certain range.