US Patent 11249852 Efficient transfer of copy-on-write snapshots

Copy-on-Write (CoW) snapshots share data on disk for extents that have not been overwritten, which allows for efficient use of disk space. A chain of snapshots may be created, where each snapshot corresponds to a point in time. A sequence of snapshots may be copied by rebuilding each snapshot for the destination volume based on the source volume, resulting in memory usage at the destination volume substantially similar to the memory usage of the snapshot sequence at the source volume.