Appliance and method for providing an ad-hoc hierarchy of caches

摘要

Systems and methods for determining a precedence for matching fingerprints of input data to an index of fingerprints identifying a plurality of instances of data in a compression history. In one embodiment, a device having a compression history establishes an index that corresponds fingerprints of a plurality of portions of data of the compression history to location identifiers identifying locations on disk having the plurality of portions of data. The device identifies that a plurality of fingerprints of input data match a plurality of entries in the index having at least one location identifier and selects an entry of the plurality of entries having a fewest number of location identifiers. The device may then match a first portion of the input data to data in a first location in the compression history identified by the selected entry.