Patent ID: 8370297

Claim:
A method for optimizing restores of deduplicated data within a storage management system, the storage management system comprising a client computing system coupled to a client data store and a server computing system coupled to a deduplicated server data store, with the method comprising: maintaining, by use of a processor, a chunk index on the client computing system, the chunk index tracking locations of chunks within files remaining on the client data store after storage of the files to the server data store; retrieving chunks for a specified file during a restore of the specified file from the server data store to the client data store, including for each chunk of the specified file: determining whether a valid entry for the chunk exists in the chunk index using a combination of a hash value for the chunk and a chunk length of the chunk as a unique identifier for the chunk; retrieving the chunk from the server data store responsive to determining a valid entry for the chunk does not exist in the chunk index; determining if a first file containing the chunk exists responsive to determining that a valid entry for the chunk exists in the chunk index; determining if the chunk resides in the first file at a specified offset responsive to determining that the first file exists, wherein the valid entry comprises the specified offset; removing the valid entry from the chunk index responsive to determining that the chunk does not reside in the first file at the specified offset; retrieving the chunk from a location on the client data store specified in the valid entry of the chunk index responsive to determining that the chunk resides in the first file at the specified offset; and reconstructing the specified file from the retrieved copies of the chunks and completing the restore of the specified file to the client data store.