US Patent 7565355 Merging file systems during a disk clone operation

A cloning manager reads contents of a source file system as a stream of objects. The cloning manager identifies a destination file system into which to merge the source file system stream during the cloning operation. The cloning manager proceeds to merge objects of the source file system stream into the destination file system according to a specific merging strategy, replacing some or all corresponding objects in the destination file system with their counterpart objects from the source file system stream, or preserving corresponding objects in the destination by discarding their counterpart objects from the source, as desired.