Patent 9778946 was granted and assigned to Dell Software on October, 2017 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A facility is described for optimizing the copying of virtual machine storage files. In various embodiments, the facility refrains from copying portions of the virtual machine storage file that do not contain any meaningful data for the purposes of the guest file system within the virtual machine storage file. In some embodiments, the facility refrains from copying portions of the file that are in use by the guest file system, but are of no practical value.