Patent ID: 8606763

Claim:
A method of operating a compression system configured to create compressed files for storage in a compression system configured to operatively interface with at least one computing device and at least one storage device operable in a storage network in accordance with at least one file access storage protocol, wherein the compression system, the at least one computing device, and the at least one storage device are separate network entities, said method comprising: a) intercepting, by the compression system, a request addressed by said at least one computer to said at least one storage device requiring said at least one storage device to store a raw file including a plurality of clusters; b) compressing said raw file to generate compressed data; c) storing the compressed data as a compressed file, the compressed file containing a header holding information identifying a size of the corresponding raw file; d) intercepting, by the compression system, a file access-related request addressed by said at least one computer to said at least one storage device and referring to the size of said raw file; e) reporting the size of the corresponding raw file in accordance with said information held in the header of the stored compressed file; f) determining a serial number of a first compressed section comprising data to be updated, said section giving rise to an original compressed section; g) determining each CLU corresponding to said original compressed section and storage location thereof by referring to a section table; h) restoring each cluster from said original compressed section; i) calculating an offset of data to be updated within said cluster and facilitating the update at a given data range; j) compressing the updated cluster into an updated compressed section; and k) overwriting said original compressed section with updated compressed section, wherein: each cluster of the raw file is sequentially processed into corresponding variable size compressed sections divided into at least one fixed-size compression logical unit (CLU).