Patent 9141301 was granted and assigned to EMC on September, 2015 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A computer-implemented method for performing garbage collection in a delta compressed data storage system selects a file recipe to traverse to identify live data chunks and a chunk identifier from the file recipe. The chunk identifier is added to a set of live data chunks. Delta references in the file recipe corresponding to the chunk identifier are added to the set of live data chunks. Data chunks in a data storage system not identified by the set of live data chunks are discarded.