Patent ID: 7962452

Claim:
A method, comprising: inserting meta data into a file containing file data to form co-mingled data; sending chunks of the co-mingled data and a mapping of boundaries that identifies offsets of which portions of each chunk of data are the meta data and which portions of each chunk of data are the file data to a data deduplication system; and under control of the data deduplication system, receiving a chunk of data storing the co-mingled file data and meta data and the mapping; using the mapping to split the chunk of data into a file data stream and a meta data stream and to store the file data from the file data stream in a first file and to store the meta data from the meta data stream in a second file, wherein the first file and the second file are separate files; and deduplicating the file data in the first file without deduplicating the meta data in the second file.