US Patent 8423733 Single-copy implicit sharing among clones

Various systems and methods are disclosed to share a single copy of a storage object among clones. For example, one method involves creating a first and second clone. The first and second clones share a single copy of a storage object. The first clone is assigned an identifier based on the value of a variable. After creating the first clone the variable is incremented. The second clone is assigned the value of the incremented variable as an identifier.