Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Charumathy Srinivasan

Karandeep Singh Anand

Abid Ali

Ravisankar V Pudipeddi

Dilip Madhusudan Ranade

Vijay Sen

Vinay Badami

Pankaj Khanzode

Amit Singla

Manoj K Valiyaparambil

Sunil Pai

Vanita Prabhu

Sriram Balasubramaniam

Methods and systems are disclosed for backup using a metadata virtual hard drive (VHD) and a differential VHD. A particular system includes a memory device that stores files and a backup agent configured to detect changes to the files. The system includes a translation module configured to translate the detected changes into VHD formatted changes and a VHD module configured to write the VHD formatted changes to a metadata VHD stored at the memory device. The VHD module is also configured to generate a differential VHD based on the metadata VHD. A network interface at the system is configured to transmit the metadata VHD and the differential VHD to a remote storage device.

Backup using metadata virtual hard drive and differential virtual hard drive

A backup system in accordance with an implementation of the present invention includes one or more light-weight (i.e., stateless) storage nodes that are positioned close enough to one or more assigned production servers to enable as rapid and efficient a data recovery as possible. The one or more light-weight storage nodes are driven by, and implement backup policies in accordance with, control settings determined by and received from a centralized backup server. Changes to the control settings are simply produced at the centralized backup server and propagated to each storage node in the system. In addition to efficient backup times, general backup administration can be greatly simplified at least in part since a large number of production serves can be serviced through a small or large number of light-weight storage nodes, which in turn can be managed by a single centralized backup server.

Managing backup solutions with light-weight storage nodes

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Hyderabad Telangana, India

Charumathy Srinivasan