Patent attributes
Methods and systems for reclaiming disk space via consolidation and deletion of expired snapshots are described. The expired snapshots may comprise snapshots of a virtual machine that are no longer required to be stored within a data storage domain (e.g., a cluster of data storage nodes or a cloud-based data store). In some cases, rather than storing an incremental file corresponding with a particular snapshot of the virtual machine, a full image of the particular snapshot may be generated and stored within the data storage domain. The generation of the full image may allow a chain of dependencies supporting the expired snapshots to be broken and for the expired snapshots to be deleted or consolidated. The full image of the particular snapshot may be generated using compute capacity in the cloud or may be generated locally by a storage appliance and uploaded to the data storage domain.
