Patent ID: 7467266

Claim:
A computer program product comprising a computer useable medium having a computer readable program, wherein the computer readable program when executed on a computer causes the computer to: add snapshot criteria to a snapshot set stored in a metadata buffer, the snapshot criteria comprising a source volume indicator, a target volume indicator, an auto-select target indicator, a redundancy level indicator, a partial volume indicator, a background copy indicator, and a source extents indicator, the auto-select target indicator indicates whether the target volume for a plurality of fast replication operations is to be automatically selected or manually specified via the target volume indicator and a target extents indicator, the redundancy level indicator configured to select a redundancy in the range of no redundancy to a RAID level 50 redundancy, the partial volume indicator configured to indicate whether either an entire volume or a partial volume is to be snapshot, the background copy indicator configured to indicate whether data transfers for the plurality of fast replications operations are conducted as a background operation, and the source extents indicator configured to indicate starting and ending indices of tracks to be snapshot, wherein the metadata buffer stores metadata for storage-based operations; and execute the plurality of fast replications operations comprising creating a snapshot set defined by metadata in the metadata buffer and deleting a specified snapshot set as specified by the snapshot set.