Patent ID: 8327107

Claim:
A system to enable an application to determine if logical objects on a volume are coherent with the last time the application wrote to the volume, the system comprising: at least one processor; at least one memory device coupled to the at least one processor and storing an application for execution on the at least one processor, the application configured to: upon completing a first write job to a partition on a volume residing on sequential access storage media, write a volume coherency set (VCS) to the partition, the VCS containing information for which coherency is desired; upon completing the first write job to the partition, make a copy of a volume change reference (VCR) value associated with the volume and store the copy in a volume coherency information (VCI) attribute associated with the partition, the VCR value configured to change in a non-repeating manner each time content on the volume is modified, the VCI attribute storing a, location identifier pointing to the VCS; prior to initiating a second write job to the partition, retrieve the copy from the VCI attribute and compare it to the current VCR value; conclude that the VCS was not modified between the first and second write jobs if the copy matches the VCR value; and conclude that the VCS was modified between the first and second write jobs if the copy does not match the VCR value.