Patent ID: 8280850

Claim:
A method for producing a delta-file encoding differences between a first data file and a second data file, each formed of data bytes, comprising: determining a set of elemental data strings defined as pseudo-matches present in the two data files in a partial match; modeling a graph of network nodes and network edges in which each network node represents a data processing operation based on the first data file for producing one of the data bytes of the second data file, and each related node, associated with a data byte of the second data file in the graph, is connected by related network edges to all preceding network nodes associated with a directly preceding data byte of the second data file; assigning the network nodes and the network edges, respectively, a cost value; ascertaining a cost-optimized path in the graph which, for all data bytes of the second data file, contains only one network node per data byte; and generating a delta-file, based on the cost-optimized path, containing a series of data processing operations and data fields corresponding to a successive sequence of network nodes in the cost-optimized path.