Patent ID: 8417672

Claim:
At a computer system, said computer system including a computer processor and system memory, said computer system communicative coupled to a backup system via a computer network, a method for providing an application with access to a backup instance to perform a recovery operation, said method comprising: identifying a read only backup instance resident at said backup system; causing a restore application associated with said application to configure said read only backup instance for read/write access by the application, including: accessing said read only backup instance; configuring a differencing mechanism to create a read/write version of said read only backup instance in read/write storage, including establishing said read only backup instance as a parent object and establishing a read/write file as a child object of said read only backup instance to store captured changes to said read only backup instance; and presenting said read/write version of said read only backup instance to said application by utilizing a storage volume to contain both said read only back up instance and said read/write file such that write operations from said application are stored separately in said read/write file by using the differencing mechanism and read operations from said application are accessed from said read only backup instance.