Patent ID: 7069594

Claim:
A method for preventing needless rescanning of objects comprising: verifying an integrity of a file system by scanning the file system resulting in at least one known scanned region; creating a database of the known scanned regions of the verified file system; and validating an integrity of an object in the file system against the database of known scanned regions; wherein the verifying comprises: receiving a file system event from a real-time monitoring system, the file system event indicating that an object in the file system has been accessed; and flagging the database of known scanned regions to indicate which of the known scanned regions was occupied by the accessed object; wherein the validating utilizes the flagging; wherein the database of known scanned regions comprises a copy of a partition table data structure indicating an identity and a location of a known scanned region occupied by the object; wherein the partition table data structure includes an inode that contains information about the object other than name, and a directory block that contains the object name and a number of the inode of the object; wherein flagging comprises indicating which of the inodes and directory blocks were occupied by the accessed object.