Method and System For Operating System File De-Duplication

When one considers all of the servers at an organization, the exact same operating system and application files will appear on many of them. Thus, there is an opportunity for saving an enormous amount of disk space for the organization as a whole by de-duplicating stored files. The present invention addresses the above needs by providing a method and system for saving at least one copy of a duplicate file in a location on a common storage system accessible to all relevant server computers and then removing the duplicates from the storage allocated to each server. Whenever the operating system on a server whose duplicate file has been removed requires access to the file, then the method redirects the operating system to access the file from the common storage system file location.