Patent ID: 8914334

Claim:
A computer program product for restoring files in a file system, wherein a backup database has information on backed-up files, the computer program product comprising a computer readable storage medium having computer readable program code embodied therein to perform operations, the operations comprising: maintaining for a point-in-time backup, as of a point-in-time, a metadata image of the file system including information on files and directories in the file system as of the point-in-time and an archive instance including a copy of database records in the backup database for the files in the point-in-time backup, wherein the metadata image includes content of files that have a size less than a threshold size; receiving a restore request to restore at least one file from the point-in-time backup; creating a file representation of each file to restore in a directory structure of the file system from the metadata image, wherein at least one of the created file representations indicates that the file is stored off-line and has an external identifier used to access information on the file in the database records in the archive instance for the point-in-time backup; for files having content included in the metadata image, restoring the file content in the file system from the metadata image; and indicating in the file representation for the file restored from the metadata image that the file is on-line.