Patent 7444465 was granted and assigned to Overland Storage on October, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A data protection and storage system includes an array of disk drives for data storage. Data is received for storage on the disk drive via an interface that is configured to emulate a tape drive interface. A virtual tape data structure is created and stored on the disk drives. The data structure includes entry tables that form a linked list where each contain links to other entry tables and information defining data storage sectors allocated to records associates a virtual tape.