Patent ID: 8843489

Claim:
A method of managing deduplicated images of data objects that change over time, said method comprising: organizing unique content of each data object as a plurality of content segments and storing the content segments in a data store; for each data object, creating an organized arrangement of hash structures, wherein: a first subset of the hash structures includes a hash signature for a corresponding content segment and is associated with a reference to the corresponding content segment in the data store, wherein a logical organization of the arrangement of hash structures represents a logical organization of the content segments as they are represented within the data object, and a second subset of the hash structures includes a hierarchy of hash signatures of said hash structures for corresponding content segments for the data object, so that the organized arrangement may be traversed to determine if content is represented by said organized arrangement of hash structures; and for each data object, maintaining an organized arrangement of temporal structures to represent the specific data object over time, wherein each temporal structure is associated with: a temporal state of the specific data object at a specific time and wherein the organized arrangement of temporal structures is organized such that subsequent temporal states of the specific data object, each subsequent temporal state representing the data object at a later time that occurs after the specific time, are linked to prior temporal states of the same specific data object, each prior temporal state representing the data object at a prior time that occurred before the specific time, and a corresponding hash structure in the hierarchy to serve as a root node for the content of the temporal state of the specific data object so that traversing the hierarchy from the root node for the content of the temporal state indicates the content of the data object during the specific time, such that data from prior and subsequent temporal states for the specific data object can be retrieved via the temporal structure; deleting the state of the specific data object at the specific time by connecting a prior temporal state of the specific data object to a subsequent temporal state of the specific data object.