Patent ID: 8161012

Claim:
A device comprising: a processor; a computer-readable storage medium that stores a file system as an image file, wherein the image file is stored on the computer-readable storage medium as a single file that comprises a plurality of files and metadata for the file system; a virtual file system comprising a mount list entry that corresponds to the file system, wherein the file system is mounted on the virtual file system, wherein the mount list entry comprises a first verified flag that indicates whether the file system has been verified, wherein the virtual file system comprises a data structure that is an in-memory representation of the image file, and wherein the mount list entry specifies the data structure as representing the image file that is used as a backing store for the file system; a verified execution module executing on the processor to determine whether the image file is corrupt when the file system is mounted; a kernel module executing on the processor to set the first verified flag when the verified execution module determines that the image file is not corrupt, wherein the kernel module obtains the data structure from the virtual file system using the mount list entry and sets the first verified flag when the data structure indicates the image file is not corrupt; and an image verify module executing on the processor to verify a file in the plurality of files when an access request is received for the file, wherein the image verify module bypasses individual verification of the file by individually verifying the file only when the first verified flag is not set.