Motivation and Context Block Cloning allows to clone a file (or a subset of its blocks) into another (or the same) file by just creating additional references to the data blocks without copying the data itself. Block Cloning can be described as a fast, manual deduplication. Description In many ways Block Cloning is similar to the existing deduplication, but there are some important differences: Deduplication is automatic and Block Cloning is not - one has to use a dedicated system call(s) to clone the given file/blocks. Deduplication keeps all data blocks in its table, even those referenced ju...