Patent ID: 8452930

Claim:
A system, comprising: a storage system comprising a storage system control module, one or more virtual volumes and a virtual file system, wherein each virtual volume is represented as a virtual file within the virtual file system, each virtual file representing data actually stored within the virtual volume; wherein the storage system control module is configured to facilitate performance of operations for backing up a selected virtual volume, the operations for backing up a selected virtual volume comprising: accessing the virtual file system on the storage system; and reading the virtual file corresponding to the selected virtual volume; wherein the storage system control module is further operable to facilitate perform operations for restoring a selected virtual volume, the operations for restoring a selected virtual volume comprising: accessing the virtual file system on the storage system; and creating a virtual file representing the selected virtual volume; wherein the storage system control module is configured to generate file image information for file image creation, the generating file image information comprising: referring to virtual volume information comprising volume logical block address information and disk block allocation information; generating, based on referring to the virtual volume information, an image of a file block header in the file image information determining an offset in the file image information for each file block based on the disk block allocation information; and generating header and footer image information for the file image information based on the determined offset in the file image information for the each file block; and wherein the storage system control module is further configured to read the file image information and perform one of a create operation and a write operation to facilitate the operations for backing up the selected virtual volume.