BACKING UP DATA TO CLOUD DATA STORAGE WHILE MAINTAINING STORAGE EFFICIENCY

Technology is disclosed for backing up data to and recovering data from a destination storage system that stores data in a format different form that of a primary storage system ("the technology"). A replication stream having the data of multiple files, metadata of the files, and reference maps including a mapping of the corresponding file to a portion of the data of the corresponding file is generated at the primary storage system. The replication stream is sent to a parser to map or convert the data, the files, and the reference maps to multiple storage objects in a format the destination storage system is configured to store. Various types of storage objects are generated, including a first type of the storage objects having the data, a second type of storage objects storing the reference maps, and a third type of the storage objects storing metadata of the files.