Patent ID: 8429131

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of preventing the restoration of expired digital assets removed from a distributed computing environment, the distributed computing environment having a central computing device that stores known meta-data for each respective one of a plurality of digital assets including the expired digital assets and one or more client computing devices that locally store respective digital assets excluding the expired digital assets, the method comprising: (1) maintaining, as part of the known meta-data stored at the central computing device for each respective one of the expired digital assets, an indication that the respective expired digital asset is expired, and (2) upon an attempt to restore a digital asset to one of the client computing devices: (a) receiving, from the client computing device, meta-data associated with the digital asset being restored at the client computing device; (b) comparing at least a portion of the received meta-data with the known meta-data to identify known meta-data matching the received meta-data; and (c) if the known meta-data matching the received meta-data includes the indication that the respective one of the digital assets is expired, then transmitting a command to prevent the digital asset associated with the received meta-data from being restored on the client computing device.