Patent 7480778 was granted and assigned to NetApp on January, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A point-in-time image of data in stored in a storage system is identified. Dependencies from the point-in-time image are detected. The dependencies are broken in an order before the point-in-time image is deleted. In one embodiment, an order in which to break the dependencies is presented to a user via one or more graphs. Based on the one or more graphs, the user determines a manner in which to break the dependencies.