Patent ID: 8121993

Claim:
A data sharing method, comprising: communicatively linking a plurality of computer devices via a communications network, wherein each of the computer devices includes a data storage storing a plurality of data objects; providing a fingerprint generation module on each of the computer devices; with each of the computer devices, processing each data object of at least a portion of the data objects in the data storage with the fingerprint generation module to generate a fingerprint for the data object, wherein the fingerprints are stored in a searchable manner in a data store, wherein each fingerprint comprises a hash value that is output from a hashing algorithm run on an associated one of the data objects, wherein the fingerprint generation module parses the hash value into a plurality of sub-strings, wherein each of the plurality of sub-strings defines a corresponding sub-directory in a directory structure of a data storage, and wherein the sub-directories define a location for an instance of the associated one of the data objects; and with a data manager on one of the computer devices, retrieving from another one of the computer devices a copy of one of the data objects in the data storage associated with the one of the computer devices using the fingerprint generated for the one of the data objects.