Patent ID: 8285682

Claim:
A method implemented in a computer-readable storage medium to process on one or more processors and to perform the method, comprising: receiving event notifications from a kernel subsystem of an operating system (OS) when changes occur to files managed by a file system (FS) of the OS; modifying a File System in User Space (FUSE) module to receive and track the event notifications received from the kernel subsystem; and exposing just a list of the files having the changes as a Virtual File System (VFS) that is used to perform a backup operation on the list of files that changed, and wherein the FUSE module exposes just the list as the VFS by abstracting the list as a subset of the FS for the OS as its own VFS, wherein receiving further includes acquiring with the event notifications a variety of metadata including inodes for the files changed, date of changes to each file, and size increase in bytes or decrease in bytes associated with the changes to each file.