Patent ID: 8595188

Claim:
A method of creating an operating system and file system independent incremental data backup, comprising: receiving a first data backup of a source system, the first data backup being a byte-level data backup of the source system's storage; receiving a second version of the source system's data as a byte stream, the second version being a verbatim binary copy of the source system's storage and received independent of the source system's file system and operating system; partitioning said second version using a chunking method selected from the group consisting of: content-agnostic chunking, content-aware chunking, and fixed-size chunking; creating a second data backup of the second version of the data, comprising: determining differences between the first data backup and the second version of the data, for a portion at a first position of the second version of the data that is the same as a portion of the first data backup, referencing the portion of the first data backup in the second data backup, for a portion at a first position of the second version of the data that is different than all portions of the first data backup, including the portion of the second version of the data in the second data backup, and creating reconstruction metadata for assembling an incremental data backup, of the first data backup, into a replication of the second version of the data; and appending the second data backup to the first data backup, the appending creates a data backup incremental of the first data backup and the second data backup.