Patent ID: 7996371

Claim:
A method for performing an at least two-phase data deduplication process, comprising: performing a context-aware data deduplication during a data storage operation to obtain context-aware deduplicated data prior to committing the data to a storage medium, the context-aware data deduplication comprising comparing data container level objects in the data with previously stored versions thereof on the storage medium using hash representations of the data container level objects and, for respective instances of identical copies of the data container level objects already stored to the storage medium, creating a pointer to an existing copy of a subject data container level object, and storing the pointer in lieu of the subject data container level object; committing the context-aware deduplicated data to the storage medium; performing a context-independent data duplication operation on the committed context-aware deduplicated data subsequent to committing the context-aware deduplicated data to obtain context-independent deduplicated context-aware deduplicated data; and committing the context-independent deduplicated context-aware deduplicated data to the storage medium.