US Patent 9002785 Stubbing systems and methods in a data replication environment

Stubbing systems and methods are provided for intelligent data management in a replication environment, such as by reducing the space occupied by replication data on a destination system. In certain examples, stub files or like objects replace migrated, de-duplicated or otherwise copied data that has been moved from the destination system to secondary storage. Access is further provided to the replication data in a manner that is transparent to the user and/or without substantially impacting the base replication process. In order to distinguish stub files representing migrated replication data from replicated stub files, priority tags or like identifiers can be used. Thus, when accessing a stub file on the destination system, such as to modify replication data or perform a restore process, the tagged stub files can be used to recall archived data prior to performing the requested operation so that an accurate copy of the source data is generated.