Patent ID: 8924591

Claim:
A method for data segmentation in data deduplication, the method comprising: acquiring, by a network device, a segmentation rule corresponding to a length of a current unsegmented data stream, wherein the segmentation rule is used to determine whether portions of the unsegmented data stream should be segmented, and wherein the segmentation rule is based on the length of the current unsegmented data stream in a data stream to be compressed such that as a length of an unsegmented data stream increases, a probability that the corresponding segmentation rule is satisfied increases monotonically, and when the segmentation rule corresponding to a first length is satisfied, the segmentation rule corresponding to a second length is definitely satisfied too, wherein the first length and the second length are the length of the unsegmented data stream, and the first length is smaller than the second length; and segmenting, by the network device, the data stream to be compressed using the segmentation rule, wherein the segmentation rule is used during storage-based data de-duplication, and wherein the segmentation rule is expressed by the following equation: RF ⁡ ( SK ) ⁢ MOD ⁢ ⁢ 2 [ ( M k ) ] = cMOD ⁢ ⁢ 2 [ ( M k ) ] , where SK is data content in the current sliding window, RF (SK) is a content fingerprint of the data content in the current sliding window, c is a preset constant, M is a preset maximum segmentation length, k is the length of the unsegmented data stream, MOD indicates a modulo operation, and M/k indicates a floor function.