Patent ID: 8874864

Claim:
A system, comprising: a storage operating system executing on a storage system having a processor and configured to generate snapshots of file system data associated with at least one data container; an on-disk structure of a file system of the storage system, the on-disk structure configured to apportion storage space of storage devices into a plurality of regions, wherein each region of the plurality of regions stores the file system data and snapshot data associated with a different sequential portion of the at least one data container, and wherein an initial block within each region maintains metadata describing the file system data and the snapshot data stored in the region, the region associated with the different sequential portion of the at least one data container; and the storage operating system further configured to: receive a write operation directed to a block within a first region of the plurality of regions wherein the write operation is associated with a new version of the block, and determine whether the new version of the block should overwrite a previous version of the block in the first region or whether the new version of block should be written to a free block in the first region, where the new version of the block is written to the free block in the first region if the initial block indicates that the previous version of the block in the first region is utilized in a snapshot and is maintained and cannot be overwritten, and where the previous version of the block is overwritten with the new version of the block in the first region if the initial block indicates that the previous version of the block in the first region is not utilized in the snapshot.