METADATA STORAGE FOR PLACEHOLDERS IN A STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION SYSTEM

A file system executing on a computing device may store a placeholder for a file on secondary storage of the computing device. The placeholder may comprise a sparse data stream containing none or some of the data of the file and information which enables the remotely stored data of the file to be retrieved from the network. As some or all of the data for the file is being stored remotely, the computing device may rely on a storage virtualization provider to create metadata for the file. Thus, the file system executing on the computing device may receive, from the storage virtualization provider, a request to store metadata associated with the file. In response to this request, the file system may store the metadata as a Binary Large Object (BLOB) in a secondary data stream of the placeholder for the file.