Patent ID: 11940956
Assignee: HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT LP
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G | IPC G

Claim 0:
1. An article comprising at least one non-transitory machine-readable storage medium comprising instructions executable by at least one processing resource of a deduplication system to:
store chunks of data in at least one container of a deduplication store;
in at least one container index, store:
chunk signatures and chunk location data for each of the chunks; and
for each chunk signature, at least one persistent item tag each corresponding to the chunk signature and identifying a respective backup item of the deduplication store that references or formerly referenced the chunk signature,

in response to a request to erase a first backup item of the backup items, erase each chunk referenced exclusively by the first backup item, without erasing any chunk referenced by a second backup item of the backup items;
after a request to erase the second backup item and based on the persistent item tags in the at least one container index, determine that all chunks formerly referenced by the first backup item have been erased; and
in response to the determination, output an indication that the first backup item has been erased.