US Patent 10180790 Efficient cloning and migration of data objects

A technique for copying a source data object within a data storage system to a destination includes ingesting data portions of the source object into respective pages of a cache. The cache associates the pages with respective descriptors and writes into the descriptors locations of storage elements that have been provided for storing the respective data portions at the destination. When later flushing these cache pages, each page is flushed to the location at the destination that is provided in the respective descriptor.