Methods and systems for providing directory services for file systems

Methods and systems are disclosed for providing incremental backup and restore operations for a file system having a large number of files. A file system accessing a mass storage device is augmented by including an enhanced directory services component (EDSC) that has an associated EDSC database that contains file system information regarding contents of the file system including file attributes. Accordingly, high-performance backup and restore operations can be performed by directly or indirectly querying the EDSC database to obtain fill attributes rather than traversing the file system's native file attribute data structures. This enables the file system to provide more consistent response to applications requesting file status independent of the number of files stored in the file system.