US Patent 7783604 Data de-duplication and offsite SaaS backup and archiving

A data protection and management solution includes a storage application operated in a tenant computer system and a data protection application hosted in a host computer system as a SaaS application. The storage application generates storage efficient backups of a raw data set stored on the tenant computer system and replicates the backups to the SaaS application. The SaaS application stores the backups and provides one or more data protection and management services, such as offsite backup, offsite archiving, and information lifecycle management, to the tenant computer system. In the event of loss or corruption of all or a portion of the raw data set on the tenant computer system, a recovery module of the storage application can be used to generate a recovered version on the tenant computer system of the raw data set based on the backups replicated to the SaaS application.