Patent ID: 8676850

Claim:
A method, comprising: maintaining , via computational device, a reference counter corresponding to a base chunk of a plurality of chunks of a deduplicated data object, wherein the reference counter is incremented in response to an insertion of any chunk that references the base chunk, and wherein the reference counter is decremented, in response to a deletion of any chunk that references the base chunk; defining a queue for processing dereferenced chunks of the plurality of chunks; and processing the dereferenced chunks in the queue in a predefined order, to free storage space, wherein the processing of the dereferenced chunks in the queue in the predefined order comprises: determining all linked chunks in the queue; deleting all the linked chunks in the queue; determining if at least one volume is emptied, in response to the deleting of the all the linked chunks; and in response to determining that at least one volume is emptied, returning the at least one volume to a storage handler.