Patent ID: 8423731

Claim:
A method for automating management of a plurality of data containers stored on one or more storage devices operatively connected to a computer, comprising: computing a priority for a data container of the plurality of data containers using an importance value associated with the data container; performing policy based management of the data container based on the computed priority, wherein performing policy based management comprises deleting the data container based on the computed priority; assigning, each data container of the plurality of data containers to a respective time slot within a backup window, wherein the backup window comprises a start time and a length of time, and wherein a length of a time slot depends on a size of changes in the assigned data container, so that unassigned time within the backup window is evenly distributed after each assigned time slot, thereby leaving approximately a same amount of unassigned time after each assigned time slot; and initiating, during each assigned time slot, one or more backup operations of one or more data containers of the plurality of data containers.