Patent ID: 9430332
Filing Date: 2016-08-30
CPC Classification: G06F

Claim Text:
1. A computer-implemented method for enabling efficient access to incremental backups, at least a portion of the method being performed by a computing device comprising at least one processor, the method comprising: selecting an incremental backup of a volume of data, the incremental backup of the volume of data storing a plurality of blocks from the volume of data that have changed since a previous backup of the volume of data; identifying block metadata for the incremental backup that describes a location of each block within the plurality of blocks in the incremental backup by specifying an offset of each block within the incremental backup; detecting synthesized block metadata for the previous backup that describes a location of each block in the volume of data according to a synthesized view of the volume of data from a full backup of the volume of data up to the previous backup by specifying an offset for each block within the volume of data that indicates a location of a version of each block as each block was at a time of the previous backup, wherein the synthesized block metadata specifies the offset of each block within the volume of data by: combining the block metadata for the incremental backup with the synthesized block metadata for the previous backup to generate new synthesized block metadata for the incremental backup, the new synthesized block metadata specifying an offset for each block within the volume of data that indicates a location of a most current version of each block since the full backup, wherein the new synthesized block metadata specifies the offset of each block within the volume of data by: after generating the new synthesized block metadata, recovering at least one block of the volume of data as the at least one block was at a time of the incremental backup by identifying a location that describes the at least one block at the time of the incremental backup based on the offset of the at least one block specified by the new synthesized block metadata.