| CPC G06F 11/2046 (2013.01) [G06F 9/45558 (2013.01); G06F 11/1662 (2013.01); G06F 11/2023 (2013.01); G06F 2009/45583 (2013.01); G06F 2201/85 (2013.01)] | 29 Claims |

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1. A method comprising:
grafting a virtual disk (vdisk) onto a snapshot chain for a workload vdisk as a thinly provisioned child vdisk of a reference snapshot, wherein snapshots of the chain are replicated to an external repository and the workload vdisk is stored on a node executing a user virtual machine (UVM) using the workload vdisk;
retrieving differences between the reference snapshot and a datasource snapshot of the snapshot chain from the repository; and
hydrating the grafted vdisk based on the differences retrieved from the repository, wherein changed read data of the reference snapshot are pulled from the external repository and unchanged read data are served from the reference snapshot stored on the node.
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