Process for fast file system crawling to support incremental file system differencing

摘要

A network storage server implements a method to perform fast crawling of a hierarchical storage structure. The hierarchical storage structure contains data entities stored by a network storage server. The hierarchical storage structure can be recursively divided into a plurality of sections. A plurality of parallel-processing threads can be used to process the plurality of sections. Each thread selects and processes one of the plurality of sections at a time to generate a sorted list of metadata corresponding to the section of the hierarchical storage structure. The sorted lists generated by the plurality of threads are merged to a baseline list. The baseline list contains sorted metadata for entities managed by the hierarchical storage structure. The baseline list can then be outputted as a representation of the state of data stored by the network storage server.