Patent ID: 7814074

Claim:
A method in a computer system for assuring integrity of deduplicated data, comprising: copying a data object within a data system to a backup storage media; generating an original object signature of the data object; storing the original object signature of the data object in an index; performing deduplication upon the data object, including dividing the data object into a set of one or more data chunks, and for each data chunk: determining if a previously stored identical copy of the data chunk exists on a primary storage media; storing the data chunk on the primary storage media in response to determining that a previously stored identical copy of the data chunk does not exist on the primary storage media; and creating a pointer to the previously stored identical copy of the data chunk on the primary storage media in response to determining that a previously stored identical copy of data chunk exists on the primary storage media; assembling the deduplicated data object into a reassembled state responsive to said data object being accessed by the computer system, wherein during a restore or a storage audit operation, the set of one more data chunks produced from the deduplicated data object are re-combined into a single data object; generating a reassembled object signature for the reassembled data object; comparing the reassembled object signature with the original object signature associated with the data object stored in the index; providing the reassembled data object if the reassembled object signature matches the original object signature; and providing the data object stored on the backup storage media if the reassembled object signature of the reassembled data object does not match the original object signature.