Patent 11372824 was granted and assigned to Cohesity on June, 2022 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Metadata of a root node from a serialized representation of a file system metadata tree data structure is obtained. A representation of the root node that references a stub intermediate node that is a placeholder for an intermediate node stored in the serialized representation is created. A request to access data of a leaf node in a tree path including the intermediate node is received. In response to the request, metadata of the intermediate node is obtained from serialized metadata representation.