Patent ID: 8725973

Claim:
A method of managing data of one or more virtual machines hosted by a virtual machine host, wherein the method is performed by one or more computing systems, each computing system having a processor and memory, the method comprising: receiving a request to copy data of at least one virtual machine to a storage device, wherein the at least one virtual machine stores data in at least one virtual machine disk file residing on a filesystem of the virtual machine host; determining the at least one virtual machine disk file in which the at least one virtual machine stores data; copying the at least one virtual machine disk file from the filesystem of the virtual machine host to the storage device; extracting, by the one or more computing systems, information from the at least one virtual machine disk file, wherein extracting information includes extracting at least one of the following: information that describes a virtual volume utilized by the at least one virtual machine; information that describes a location of a virtual file allocation table utilized by the at least one virtual machine, wherein the virtual file allocation table provides for locations of virtual files within the virtual volume; and information that describes a relationship between the at least one virtual machine disk file and another virtual machine disk file in which the at least one virtual machine stores data; associating the extracted information with the at least one virtual machine; and storing the extracted information in association with the at least one virtual machine.