US Patent 11442897 Optimizing content storage through stubbing

In some examples, a client device may send, to a service computing device over a network, a request for information related to a change to a file system associated with the client device. In response, the client device may receive, from the service computing device, a list of one or more changes to the file system. The client device may add and/or update metadata for a stub file on the client device based at least partially on the received list of one or more changes. In some cases, the stub file may include a stub data structure stored on the client device, while the file content of the file corresponding to the stub file may be stored at a storage over the network.