US Patent 11645236 Extending retention lock protection from on-premises to the cloud

Embodiments for retention locking a deduplicated file stored in cloud storage by defining object metadata for each object of the file, and comprising a lock count and a retention time based on an expiry date of the lock, with each object having segments, the object metadata further having a respective expiry date and lock count for each segment, where at least some segments are shared among two or more files. Also updating the lock count and retention time for all segments of the file being locked; and if the object is not already locked, locking the object using a retention lock defining a retention time and updating the object metadata with a new lock count and the retention time, otherwise incrementing the lock count and updating the retention time for the expiry date if expiry date of a previous lock is older than a current expiry date.