Patent ID: 8504529

Claim:
A method for restoring data to a storage controller, the method comprising: receiving a backup image including file system metadata and a plurality of data blocks, wherein the file system metadata includes information defining a plurality of directories and information defining a plurality of data containers, the information defining a plurality of data containers including a listing of data blocks associated with individual data containers of the plurality of data containers; copying the plurality of data blocks to the storage controller; generating a data warehouse structure based on the file system metadata, wherein the data warehouse structure stores references to individual data blocks of the plurality of data blocks and wherein the references are indexed by an identifier determined based on the file system metadata; generating a directory structure in a file system associated with the storage controller based on the file system metadata; generating a plurality of empty data containers in the generated directory structure based on the file system metadata, wherein generating an empty data container includes generating a data structure and populating the data structure with metadata based on the file system metadata; and populating data container contents of individual data containers of the plurality of empty data containers by associating individual data blocks of the plurality of data blocks with the individual data containers based on the data warehouse structure, wherein populating data container contents of an individual data container includes determining a volume block identifier associated with a data block in the individual data container from the file system metadata and copying a reference associated with the volume block identifier in the data warehouse structure into the data structure.