Patent ID: 8156375

Claim:
A method for restoring one or more portions of application data comprising: virtualizing one or more backup files of the application data into a specified staging area, wherein virtualizing one or more backup files of the application data into a specified staging location comprises virtually linking the one or more backup files into the specified staging area in the event that the one or more backup files to be virtually linked are determined to be on a volume different from the volume of the specified staging area; running a recovery process for the one or more backup files wherein the recovery process includes: enabling recovery by writing recovery changes to one or more recovery files, wherein writing recovery changes to one or more recovery files allows the one or more backup files to remain unmodified; and saving the one or more backup files and the one or more recovery files; virtualizing the one or more backup files and the one or more recovery files; instantiating an instance of an application utilizing the virtualized one or more backup files and the virtualized one or more recovery files; and recovering one or more portions of the application data; wherein the one or more backup files comprise snapshots of an application server which are provided to a backup server.