Patent ID: 8402216

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for off-host backups, at least a portion of the method being performed by a computing device comprising at least one processor, the method comprising: identifying a striped volume of data on which to perform an off-host backup operation, the striped volume of data comprising a volume of data written to by a host system; generating, at the host system, stripe-aware extent metadata for the off-host backup operation, the stripe-aware extent metadata comprising stripe location information for one or more data stripes within the striped volume of data; providing the stripe-aware extent metadata to an off-host backup system that is remote from the host system to enable the off-host backup system to read the striped volume of data directly; at the off-host backup system, for each storage device underlying the striped volume of data, identifying a storage device offset within the stripe-aware extent metadata; at the off-host backup system, identifying, within the stripe-aware extent metadata, a stripe size and a number of times to loop to read a striped extent of data; performing the off-host backup operation at the off-host backup system, wherein: the off-host backup system is remote from the host system and uses the stripe-aware extent metadata to read at least a portion of the striped volume of data directly from the host system by reading directly from each storage device underlying the striped volume of data; for each storage device underlying the striped volume of data the off-host backup system reads from the storage device at the offset for the storage device identified in the stripe-aware extent metadata and, for each time in the number of times, the off-host backup system increases the storage device offset by the stripe size and reads from the storage device at the increased offset.