Patent ID: 8224876

Claim:
A method of tagging comprising: identifying a computer system, onto which an image file will be provisioned; creating a tag that identifies the computer system, wherein the creating comprises generating a pattern of a storage characteristic of a storage device of the computer system, wherein the image file comprises a plurality of files, the storage characteristic indicates, at least in part, a storage placement of a file in a storage device, the generating comprises forming a differential association between a first storage placement and a second storage placement, a first file of the plurality of files is written to the storage device at the first storage placement, a second file of the plurality of files is written to the storage device at the second storage placement, the differential association indicates a differential between the first storage placement and the second storage placement, the pattern comprises a set of differential associations between respective storage placements of at least some of the plurality of files, and the pattern encodes the tag; and provisioning the image file onto the computer system, wherein the provisioning configures the computer system to operate as a clone of a reference computer system, the provisioning comprises writing the plurality of files of the image file to the storage device according to the respective storage placements of the pattern, and the writing the plurality of files of the image file according to the respective storage placements of the pattern results in the tag being embedded in the image file.