| CPC G06F 11/1448 (2013.01) | 21 Claims |

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1. A method, comprising:
constructing a first tree from first meta data that describes first stored content in a first storage system, the first tree having a hierarchy of levels of nodes, with successively higher levels of the hierarchy having fewer nodes, where a node at a lowest level is computed as a hash of meta data about a first object of the first storage system and variants of the first object as changed over time, and where each successively higher level of the hierarchy is computed as a hash of multiple nodes from the level below, representing successively more stored content of the first storage system;
constructing a second tree from second meta data that describes second stored content in a second storage system, the second tree having the hierarchy of nodes, with successively higher levels of the hierarchy having fewer nodes, where a node at a lowest level is computed as a hash of meta data about a second object of the second storage system and variants of the second object as changed over time, and where each successively higher level of the hierarchy is computed as a hash of multiple nodes from the level below, representing successively more stored content of the second storage system, and wherein, the first storage system and second storage system support snapshots; and,
comparing a subset of the nodes of the first tree with a corresponding subset of the nodes of the second tree to ascertain sameness between the first stored content represented by the subset of the nodes of the first tree and the second stored content represented by the subset of the nodes of the second tree, to further ascertain sameness between the first storage system and the second storage system.
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