Patent ID: 8055618

Claim:
A method, comprising: under control of a data deduplication system, receiving chunks of co-mingled data having file data and meta data; splitting the chunks of data into a file data stream stored in a first file and a meta data stream stored in a second file; and deduplicating the file data in the first file without deduplicating the meta data in the second file; and in response to receiving a request for the chunks of data, alternating between reading the meta data stream and the file data stream to fill a data buffer by: determining whether to read the meta data stream or the file data stream next based on header information in the meta data; in response to determining that the meta data stream is to be read, reading the meta data into the data buffer; and in response to determining that the file data stream is to be read, reading the file data into the data buffer while reassembling the file data that was previously deduplicated using a reconstruction structure to put together the chunks of the file data stream; and returning the chunks of co-mingled data having the file data and the meta data in the data buffer.