Systems and Methods Involving Virtual Machine Images

[0024]Virtual machine images are typically large files that use considerable storage space. One method for reducing the storage space used for virtual machine images includes Mirage transformations. Mirage transformation divides virtual machine images into units of data called shards. The shards are stored in a content addressable store (CAS) as shown in FIG. 1. A shard (content) that is contributed to the CAS 100 is associated with a content id (cid). A shard may be retrieved from the CAS 100 by presenting the associated cid. The Mirage transformation creates a unique manifest for each virtual machine image (image). The manifest includes a cid for each shard in an image, and includes information that allows the image to be constructed from the shards. Using Mirage transformations allows storage space to be reduced and provide a variety of version control options for users.

[0025]FIG. 2 illustrates a file version control system (FVCS) 200. The FVCS 200 associates tokens with file data.