Patent ID: 7865473

Claim:
An article of manufacture comprising a computer readable storage medium including production code executed by a production server and backup code executed by a backup server to perform operations with respect to a storage and backup storage, the operations comprising: initiating, by the production code, a virtual copy operation to create a virtual copy in the backup storage of a data set in the storage, wherein the virtual copy represents the data set at a point-in-time copy, and wherein the virtual copy is completed without transferring the data set to a backup location; determining, by the backup code, whether an incremental backup has been created with respect to the virtual copy; creating a first incremental backup set comprising a full backup of the data set represented by the virtual copy as of the point-in-time of the virtual copy in response to determining that an incremental backup has not been created for the virtual copy; and initiating, by the backup code, an incremental backup operation with respect to the virtual copy in response to determining that an incremental backup has been created, wherein the incremental backup operation performs: determining a last incremental backup point-in-time comprising a point-in-time of a most recently created incremental backup set, wherein the most recently created incremental backup set comprises the first incremental backup set or an incremental backup set created subsequent to the creation of the first incremental backup set, and copying data in the data set in the storage that was modified between the determined last incremental backup point-in-time and a current time to a new incremental backup set.