Patent ID: 8805807

Claim:
A method of storing distributed index information describing secondary copies of data, the method comprising: copying primary data stored in one or more primary storage devices to one or more secondary storage devices, wherein copying the primary data to the secondary storage device creates a secondary copy on the one or more secondary storage devices, the primary data generated by one or more software applications running on a client computer; indexing a first portion of the secondary copy stored on the one or more secondary storage devices, wherein indexing the first portion of the secondary copy creates a first index of the first portion of secondary data; storing the first index in association with a first index server; indexing a second portion of the secondary copy stored on the one or more secondary storage devices, wherein indexing the second portion of secondary copy creates a second index of the second portion of secondary data; storing the second index in association with a second index server; wherein the first and second index servers are networked together and collectively provide a distributed index comprising the first and second indexes; copying the first index associated with the first index server to the second index server so that the first index is available at the first and second index servers; identifying that a plurality of requests for secondary data are associated with the first index; distributing the plurality of requests for the secondary data associated with the first index among the first and second index servers to lessen a load on the first index server; performing a storage operation that copies new primary data stored in the one or more primary storage devices to the one or more secondary storage devices; generating an index update associated with copying the new primary data stored in the one or more primary storage devices to the one or more secondary storage devices; determining that the first index server is not available; and updating the distributed index by copying the index update to the second index server.