Stubbing systems and methods in a data replication environment

摘要

Stubbing systems and methods are provided for intelligent data management in a replication environment, such as by reducing the space occupied by replication data on a destination system. In certain examples, stub files or like objects replace migrated, de-duplicated or otherwise copied data that has been moved from the destination system to secondary storage. Access is further provided to the replication data in a manner that is transparent to the user and/or without substantially impacting the base replication process. In order to distinguish stub files representing migrated replication data from replicated stub files, priority tags or like identifiers can be used. Thus, when accessing a stub file on the destination system, such as to modify replication data or perform a restore process, the tagged stub files can be used to recall archived data prior to performing the requested operation so that an accurate copy of the source data is generated.

主权项

1. A computer-implemented method comprising:
receiving, in response to a communication from a first computing device, a modification instruction to modify a first portion of data at a second computing device, at least a portion of the first portion of data received from the first computing device at a point in time prior to receiving the communication from the first computing device, the first portion of data including a stub file; determining, based at least in part on whether the stub file includes a tag value, whether the stub file is of a first type of stub file or a second type of stub file, wherein the first type of stub file indicates that the stub file was received with the first portion of data from the first computing device and wherein the second type of stub file indicates that the stub file was created at the second computing device after the first portion of data was received from the first computing device; in response to determining that the stub file is of the second type of stub file:
retrieving a data block from a secondary storage of the second computing device;replacing the stub file with the data block to obtain a restored first portion of data; andmodifying the restored first portion of data based on the modification instruction.