POINT-IN-TIME COPY WITH CHAIN CLONING

A method and system for storage copy with chain cloning are provided, including providing a volume with one or more snapshots in the form of a dependency chain, where the volume and one or more snapshots are volume nodes in the dependency chain and providing associated metadata required to maintain the one or more snapshots; cloning the dependency chain to create at least one a sparse copy chain including sparse copies of the volume and the one or more snapshots resulting in sparse volume nodes, resulting in a lattice structure of the dependency chain of volume nodes and one or more sparse copy chains of cloned volume nodes.