Patent ID: 8346727

Claim:
A method comprising: generating an optimized backup image of a virtual machine, wherein said virtual machine is associated with a virtual disk, said virtual disk comprises one or more virtual volumes, said generating comprises excluding one or more invalid sectors of said virtual disk from said optimized backup image, and said excluding said one or more invalid sectors comprises identifying one or more valid sectors within a first virtual volume of said one or more virtual volumes, wherein said one or more valid sectors excludes one or more unused sectors of the virtual disk, said one or more valid sectors excludes one or more sectors associated with a file deleted from the virtual disk, and said identifying said one or more valid sectors comprises creating an extent list of locations of said one or more valid sectors, reading a file system structure within said first virtual volume to determine virtual volume-relative locations of said one or more invalid sectors, translating said virtual volume-relative locations to virtual disk-relative locations of said one or more invalid sectors, and excluding said virtual disk-relative locations of said one or more invalid sectors from said extent list.