| CPC G06F 11/1466 (2013.01) [G06F 11/1451 (2013.01); G06F 11/1464 (2013.01)] | 20 Claims |

|
1. A non-transitory machine-readable storage medium comprising instructions that upon execution cause a first computer node to:
maintain a first modified data tracking structure in a memory of the first computer node, wherein the first modified data tracking structure comprises indicators of modified data portions in a network-attached memory as modified by the first computer node;
responsive to an access of a memory region in the network-attached memory, add an entry to a data structure, the added entry identifying the memory region and including a virtual address for the memory region;
derive an index from the virtual address in the data structure, the index referring to a respective entry of the first modified data tracking structure for a data portion;
retrieve the respective entry from the first modified data tracking structure using the index, and determine whether the data portion is modified based on the respective entry;
create a combined tracking data structure based on entries in the first modified data tracking structure indicating modified data portions and based on a second modified data tracking structure maintained at a second computer node, wherein the second modified data tracking structure comprises indicators of modified data portions in the network-attached memory as modified by the second computer node;
store the combined tracking data structure at the network-attached memory; and
initiate an incremental data backup operation using the combined tracking data structure to copy modified data portions from the network-attached memory to a backup storage system.
|