Patent ID: 8225109

Claim:
A computer-implemented method, comprising: at a first computer system, compressing and encrypting file system data in a manner that is independent of an operating system of the first computer system so as to enable a second computer system having an operating system that differs from that of the first computer system to decrypt and expand the file system data, wherein the file system data represents a baseline backup for an incremental backup procedure; at the first computer system, generating a data digest that uniquely identifies the compressed and encrypted file system data; at the first computer system, writing the compressed and encrypted file system data, along with the data digest, to a portable storage device to facilitate secure manual transportation of the file system data to the second computer system; subsequent to writing the compressed and encrypted file system data to the portable storage device, monitoring the file system data at the first computer system to determine if changes are made to the file system data; and periodically communicating a subset of the file system data over a network to the second computer system, wherein the subset of the file system data represents those portions of the file system data that have changed since a previous backup operation.