US Patent 7269706 Adaptive incremental checkpointing

A method, apparatus and computer program product are disclosed for incrementally checkpointing the state of a computer memory in the presence of at least one executing software application at periodic instants. A secure hash function is periodically applied to each partitioned contiguous block of memory to give a periodic block hash value. At each periodic instant, a block hash value for each block is compared with a respective preceding block hash value to determine if said memory block has changed according to whether said block hash values are different. Only changed memory blocks are stored in a checkpoint record. The memory block sizes are adapted at each periodic instant to split changed blocks into at least two parts and to merge only two non-changed contiguous blocks at a time.