Patent ID: 8578120

Claim:
A computing system for reclaiming storage space on one or more storage devices having native file systems, wherein the storage space is utilized by one or more logical containers to store deduplicated blocks of data, wherein locations of the deduplicated blocks of data in the logical containers are not tracked by the native file systems of the storage devices, the computing system comprising: one or more storage devices storing on physical media— one or more logical containers that include multiple deduplicated blocks of data that correspond to data objects; and one or more data structures that indicate whether the blocks of data are referred to; one or more databases storing information indicating whether the blocks of data are referred to; and a secondary storage computing device programmed to— receive an indication to remove a first set of blocks of data from a first logical container; for each of the blocks of data in the first set— determine, from the databases, whether the block of data is referred to; and if the block of data is not referred to, update the data structures to indicate that the block of data is not referred to; determine from the data structures that a threshold number of contiguous blocks of data in the first logical container that are not referred to has been reached; and make available for storage portions of the one or more physical media corresponding to the contiguous blocks of data in the first logical container, wherein the data structures and the databases are not part of the native file systems of the storage devices.