US Patent 7725438 Method and apparatus for efficiently creating backup files

A method and apparatus for creating backup files by creating an overhead segment for each file that is to be backed up and creating a data segment containing the data that is to be backed up for each file. After creating overhead segment and the data segment, the overhead segment is placed into an overhead stream and the data segment is stored in a memory. The overhead segment is also positioned in the overhead stream with a pointer that identifies the location of the data within the memory. As such, the backup file comprises a data segment and an overhead stream.