US Patent 11461229 Efficient garbage collection of variable size chunking deduplication

The present disclosure provides techniques for deallocating previously allocated storage blocks. The techniques include obtaining a list of chunk IDs to analyze, choosing a chunk ID, and determining the storage blocks spanned by the chunk corresponding to the chosen chunk ID. The technique further includes determining whether any file references any storage blocks spanned by the chunk. The determining may be performed by comparing an internal reference count to a total reference count, where the internal reference count is the number of reference to the storage block by a chunk ID data structure. If no files reference any of the storage blocks spanned by the chunk, then all the storage blocks of the chunk can be deallocated.