Abstract: System and method for implementing parallel Change File Tracking (CFT) between a distributed File Server Virtual Machine (FSVM) system and a scale-out backup system using underlying snapshot technology. The FSVM system executes efficient assignments of backup streams between worker nodes of the backup system and computing nodes of the FSVM system based on the number of available worker nodes at the backup system. The assignment of backup streams allows for parallel processing of incremental backup data based on successive data file snapshots. The parallel incremental backup may, for example, be per node, per share, or per data size across nodes or shares.

Abstract: Providing snapshots for a logical device includes maintaining a global sequence number for the logical device, providing a snapshot table having a plurality of entries, where each of the entries corresponds to a targetless snapshot and includes a sequence number associated with a particular one of the targetless snapshots, the sequence number corresponding to the global sequence number at a time each of the snapshots is created, and, if a sequence number associated with a specific portion of the logical device is less than the global sequence number, then prior to moving new data to a specific portion of the logical device, copying old data from the specific portion to a location in a pool device, setting a pointer in a replication data pointer table to point to the location in the pool device and setting the sequence number associated with the specific portion to equal the global sequence number.