Patent ID: 8046333

Claim:
A method for an incremental dump procedure without performing a walkthrough of all of the directory hierarchies in a file system, the method comprising: accessing in a storage server a file system that contains a plurality of data containers and a plurality of metadata containers, each of the plurality of metadata containers corresponding to a separate one of the plurality of data containers; traversing the plurality of metadata containers in the file system to read each of the plurality of metadata containers and determine whether each of the plurality of metadata containers has been modified since a previous backup; for each metadata container determined to have been modified during said traversing, recording, into a table, metadata including a parent information of the modified metadata container and information of the modified metadata container; recording, into the table, metadata including an upper parent information corresponding to an upper parent of the immediate parent of at least one modified metadata container; marking a flag value in the table for each previously traversed metadata container and using each said flag value to avoid subsequently reading and copying a previously traversed metadata container; reading the table to determine each modified data container since the previous backup, an immediate parent of each modified data container since the previous backup, and each upper parent corresponding to the upper parent information; and based on information in the table, saving, into a media, a modified data container corresponding to each modified metadata container since the previous backup, the immediate parent of each modified metadata container since the previous backup, and each said upper parent.