Abstract: A method for automatically encrypting files is disclosed. In some cases, the method may be performed by computer hardware comprising one or more processors. The method can include detecting access to a first file, which may be stored in a primary storage system. Further, the method can include determining whether the access comprises a write access. In response to determining that the access comprises a write access, the method can include accessing file metadata associated with the first file and accessing a set of encryption rules. In addition, the method can include determining whether the file metadata satisfies the set of encryption rules. In response to determining that the file metadata satisfies the set of encryption rules, the method can include encrypting the first file to obtain a first encrypted file and modifying an extension of the first encrypted file to include an encryption extension.

Abstract: An illustrative media agent (MA) in a data storage management system instructs a NAS file server (filer) to restore an MA-created synthesized-copy instead of larger filer-created backup copies. The synthesized-copy is designed only for the particular files to be restored and mimics, and is typically much smaller than, a filer-created backup copy. The synthesized-copy is fed to the filer on restore as a “restore data image.” When receiving a restore request for certain backed-up data files, the MA synthesizes the synthesized-copy on the fly. The MA generates a header mimicking a filer-created backup header; extracts files from filer-created backup copies arranging them within the synthesized-copy as if in filer-created backups; and instructs filer to perform a full-volume restore from the synthesized-copy. The MA serves the synthesized-copy piecemeal as available, rather than waiting to synthesize the entire synthesized-copy. The synthesized-copy is not stored at the MA.

Abstract: Virtual machine (VM) proliferation may be reduced through the use of Virtual Server Agents (VSAs) assigned to a group of VM hosts that may determine the availability of a VM to perform a task. Tasks may be assigned to existing VMs instead of creating a new VM to perform the task. Furthermore, a VSA coordinator may determine a grouping of VMs or VM hosts based on one or more factors associated with the VMs or the VM hosts, such as VM type or geographical location of the VM hosts. The VSA coordinator may also assign one or more VSAs to facilitate managing the group of VM hosts. In some embodiments, the VSA coordinators may facilitate load balancing of VSAs during operation, such as during a backup operation, a restore operation, or any other operation between a primary storage system and a secondary storage system.

Abstract: Software, firmware, and systems are described herein that migrate functionality of a source physical computing device to a destination physical computing device. A non-production copy of data associated with a source physical computing device is created. A configuration of the source physical computing device is determined. A configuration for a destination physical computing device is determined based at least in part on the configuration of the source physical computing device. The destination physical computing device is provided access to data and metadata associated with the source physical computing device using the non-production copy of data associated with the source physical computing device.

Abstract: An illustrative pseudo-file-system driver uses deduplication functionality and resources in a storage management system to provide an application and/or a virtual machine with access to a locally-stored file system. From the perspective of the application/virtual machine, the file system appears to be of virtually unlimited capacity. The pseudo-file-system driver instantiates the file system in primary storage, e.g., configured on a local disk. The application/virtual machine requires no configured settings or limits for the file system's storage capacity and may thus treat the file system as “infinite.” The pseudo-file-system driver intercepts write requests and may use the deduplication infrastructure in the storage management system to offload excess data from local primary storage to deduplicated secondary storage, based on a deduplication database.

Abstract: Encryption of data occurs before it is written to the storage platform; decryption occurs after it is read from the storage platform on a computer separate from the storage platform. By encrypting data before it travels over a wide-area network to a storage platform (and by only decrypting that data once it has arrived at an enterprise from the storage platform), we address data security over the network. Application data is encrypted at the virtual disk level before it leaves a controller virtual machine, and is only decrypted at that controller virtual machine after being received from the storage platform. Encryption and decryption of data is compatible with other services of the storage system such as de-duplication. Any number of key management services can be used in a transparent manner.

Abstract: The disclosed enhancements optimize the use of the live browse cache and pseudo-disk storage areas, improving metadata handling so that it can be used more effectively to speed up live browse and file indexing of backup copies in a data storage management system. The enhancements operate granularly to identify within each extent being backed up smaller sectors that comprise metadata. The disclosed approach pre-fetches the metadata of the backup copy before allowing the file scan of the file indexing and/or the live browse operation to proceed. The backup operation, the file indexing operation, and the live browse operation are enhanced to handle the more granular metadata sectors without changing the granularity of the full extents generated and stored in the backup.

Abstract: Data storage operations, including content-indexing, containerized deduplication, and policy-driven storage, are performed within a cloud environment. The systems support a variety of clients and cloud storage sites that may connect to the system in a cloud environment that requires data transfer over wide area networks, such as the Internet, which may have appreciable latency and/or packet loss, using various network protocols, including HTTP and FTP. Methods are disclosed for content indexing data stored within a cloud environment to facilitate later searching, including collaborative searching. Methods are also disclosed for performing containerized deduplication to reduce the strain on a system namespace, effectuate cost savings, etc. Methods are disclosed for identifying suitable storage locations, including suitable cloud storage sites, for data files subject to a storage policy.

Abstract: Certain embodiments disclosed herein reduce or eliminate a communication bottleneck at the storage manager by reducing communication with the storage manager while maintaining functionality of an information management system. In some implementations, a client obtains information for enabling a secondary storage job (e.g., a backup or restore) from a storage manager and stores the information (which may be referred to as job metadata) in a local cache. The client may then reuse the job metadata for multiple storage jobs reducing the frequency of communication with the storage manager. When a configuration of the information management system changes, or the availability of resources changes, the storage manager can push updates to the job metadata to the clients. Further, a client can periodically request updated job metadata from the storage manager ensuring that the client does not rely on out-of-date job metadata.

Abstract: Described herein are techniques for better understanding problems arising in an illustrative information management system, such as a data storage management system, and for issuing appropriate alerts and reporting to data management professionals. The illustrative embodiments include a number of features that detect and raise awareness of anomalies in system operations, such as in deduplication pruning operations. Such anomalies can include delays in the processing of archive files to be deleted and/or delays in the generation of the list of archive files to delete. Anomalies are characterized by frequency anomalies and/or by occurrence counts. Utilization is also of interest for certain key system resources, such as deduplication databases, CPU and memory at the storage manager, etc., without limitation.

Abstract: The present inventors devised techniques and technologies that streamline the protection of data stored on shared file storage e.g., on file servers, network-attached storage (NAS), share drives, network shares, etc., in a data storage management system. Some embodiments feature a proxy-less backup configuration in which backup services hosts are assigned to perform a secondary copy job, at job runtime, based on host attributes relative to the data source. Some embodiments are configured to, at job runtime, automatically resolve data paths to the source data, and automatically mount the data paths, rather than requiring data paths to be expressly pre-administered on all possible candidate backup machines. Some embodiments automatically protect data from shared file storage that was not expressly given a backup plan (“undefined” data) by applying default preferences for protecting undefined data.

Abstract: Systems and methods are described herein for graphically representing an information management system based on the characteristics of within the system. The systems and methods interface with various components of the system (e.g., administrative components, index components, and so on) to identify data having certain characteristics (e.g., personal data), and generate or render information (e.g., a heat map or other visual display) that represents areas or locations within the system storing the data. Thus, the systems and methods, in some embodiments, generate or create a data-specific view into the information management system.

Abstract: A method and system for communicating with IoT devices to gather information related to device failure or error(s) is disclosed. The system makes a copy of at least a portion of the device's non-volatile memory and/or receives IoT device data (e.g., sensor data and/or log files etc.) from an IoT device that recently failed. The system determines which log files and/or sensor data, for example, the IoT device created before and/or after a failure. After gathering this information, the system stores the information in a database, sends it to the IoT device manufacturer, for further analysis and diagnostics to troubleshoot the failure and send a fix or software update to the IoT device.

Abstract: A holistic approach protects serverless applications in various cloud and/or non-cloud data center computing environments. An illustrative data storage management system deploys, or causes to be deployed, a discovery tracker function in a customer's cloud service account. The discovery tracker identifies and tracks what applications are executing therein, whether they are already known to the illustrative system or not. This aspect ensures that the system is up-to-date with a customer's cloud deployments, so that it may timely back up active applications, and conversely, so that it may dispose properly of copies of applications that are no longer deployed. The discovery tracker discovers application assets, relationships, and interoperability dependencies. The illustrative system creates a corresponding “application entity” that references the various assets. An orchestration function coordinates storage management operations to generate a set of copies of the application's discovered assets.

Abstract: A data storage system according to certain aspects can share a single snapshot for multiple applications and/or agents. For example, the data storage system can receive snapshot commands from multiple applications and/or agents, and can group them for a single snapshot (e.g., based on time of receipt of the snapshot commands). Data associated with the multiple applications and/or agents may reside on a single LUN or volume. The data storage system can take a single snapshot of the LUN or volume, and generate metadata regarding which portion of the snapshot is related to which application. The single snapshot can be stored in one or more secondary storage devices. The single snapshot may be partitioned into portions relating to different applications and stored separately.

Abstract: A system according to certain aspects improves the process of performing snapshot replication operations (e.g., maintaining a mirror copy of primary data at a secondary location by generating snapshots of the primary data). The system can collect and maintain cumulative block-level changes to the primary data after each sub-interval of a plurality of sub-intervals between the snapshots. When a snapshot is generated, any changes to the primary data not reflected in the cumulative block-level changes are identified based on the snapshot and transmitted to the secondary location along with the cumulative block-level changes. By the time the snapshot is generated, some or all of the changes to the primary data associated with the given snapshot have already been included in the cumulative block-level changes, thereby reducing the time and computing resources spent to identify and collect the changes for transmission to the secondary location.

Abstract: Disclosed methods and systems leverage resources in a storage management system to restore a selected backup to a production site. The backup is partitioned into blocks with associated signatures. The production site may have blocks that have not changed from when the backup occurred, so those blocks do not need to be restored. Block signatures from the production site are compared with block signatures from the incremental backup to identify blocks that need to be restored. Efficiency may be achieved by synchronizing the replacement blocks from more easily accessible location where available before synchronizing from less accessible locations. In some embodiments, a user may specify the location of the site with the replacement blocks.

Abstract: The present inventors devised a holistic approach for protecting serverless applications in single-cloud, multi-zone, multi-cloud, and/or non-cloud data center computing environments. An illustrative data storage management system discovers application assets, relationships, and interoperability dependencies and creates an “application entity” that references the various assets. Protection preferences apply to the application entity as a whole. An orchestration function in the system coordinates storage management operations (e.g., backup, replication, live synchronization, etc.) in a suitable order of operations gleaned from asset dependencies, if any. A set of copies of the application's discovered assets are generated in coordinated fashion and represent a point-in-time copy of the application. The point-in-time copy can be restored and/or migrated to other computing services by the data storage management system.

Abstract: A system for performing continuous transaction log backups with minimal resource usage of the client computing devices that are processing the transactions is disclosed. The system detects at least one input/output (I/O) activity at a client computing device. The I/O activity can be associated with at least one database operation performed via the client computing device. The system then executes one or more native commands to backup transactions log data associated with the detected I/O activity to a virtualized location. Backing-up the transactions log data comprises dynamically identifying a mount path location corresponding to the virtualized location, and transferring the transactions log data to the dynamically identified mount path using the one or more native commands. The system can then perform data processing operations (for example, data chunking and deduplicating) on the transactions log data after it is received at the dynamically identified mount path location.

Abstract: An information management security health monitoring system is provided herein that can monitor the security health of one or more information management systems, identify any security issues that are occurring within an information management system, and automatically, or in response to a user input, transmit an instruction to the information management system to execute a workflow to resolve the security issue(s). For example, the information management cell health monitoring system receives security data and security policies, and/or similar data from an information management cell(s) via a network. The information management security health monitoring system analyzes the received information to identify any issues. If an issue is detected, the information management security health monitoring system retrieves workflows and determines whether any of the workflows can be used to resolve the detected issue.