Patent ID: 8504533

Claim:
A method for performing maintenance on a block pool and an index produced by a deduplication system, comprising: controlling a processor to access first data associated with members of a set of references to members of a set of blocks of data stored by a data de-duplication system in a block pool; controlling the processor to process the first data to manipulate a Bloom filter into a state from which membership in the set of references can be assessed, wherein processing the first data to manipulate the Bloom filter comprises using a first set of hashes, wherein the first data is one of, a list of references to blocks stored in the block pool, a list of references to BLOBs stored in the block pool; controlling the processor to access a block identifier identified with a member of the set of blocks of data stored by the data de-duplication system; controlling the processor to assess membership in the set of references for the block identifier by querying the Bloom filter with the block identifier, wherein querying the Bloom filter with the block identifier includes processing the block identifier using the first set of hashes; and controlling the processor to selectively perform a block reclamation action upon determining that the Bloom filter indicates that there is no member of the set of references associated with the block identifier, wherein the reclamation action comprises deleting the block from the block pool and reclaiming storage in the block pool associated with the block.