Patent ID: 7165188

Claim:
A method for managing a long-running process carried out upon a plurality of disks, the method comprising the steps of: establishing a registry having a plurality of entries, each entry corresponding to one of the plurality of disks, each entry storing a value of a last acted-upon time indicative of a respective time at which the entries' corresponding disk was last acted-upon by the long-running process; sorting the plurality of entries into an order based upon a comparison of the last acted-upon time of each entry with the last acted-upon time of one or more other entries; performing the long-running process on each of the disks based upon the order, in which the disk having an oldest last acted-upon time is processed first and the disk having a newest last acted-upon time is processed last; ceasing the long-running process; and restarting the long-running process on each of the disks so that the disk with the oldest last acted-upon time remaining after ceasing the long-running process is processed first.