Patent ID: 7617259

Claim:
A method for a file system to perform a redundancy consistency recovery operation for a file on a storage system without using any redundancy consistency mechanism of the storage system, comprising: a file system receiving data modification requests each indicating data modifications to a file on a storage system, wherein the storage system comprises a plurality of storage devices configured to store data and redundancy data for the file; for each data modification request: the file system saving dirty file information at a file system level, wherein the dirty file information is separate from the data and redundancy data for the file, wherein the dirty file information indicates one or more portions of the file to be modified, wherein the one or more portions correspond to the indicated data modifications; and the file system performing the indicated data modifications on the storage system, wherein said performing comprises storing redundancy data for the indicated data modifications, wherein the data modifications and redundancy data are stored on the storage system and are stored separately from the dirty file information; and performing a redundancy consistency recovery operation for the file on the storage system without using any redundancy consistency mechanism of the storage system, wherein the redundancy consistency recovery operation uses the dirty file information.