Method and system for automatically constructing a replica catalog for maintaining protection relationship information between primary and secondary storage objects in a network storage system

Embodiments of the present invention provide a technique for automatically constructing a replica catalog providing information otherwise unavailable due to a loss of or failure with the registry file for maintaining protection relationship information of primary and secondary storage objects by extracting storage object settings from an encoded attribute of the secondary storage object. An administrator provides protection relationship information for the primary and secondary storage objects at a remote computer system (e.g., protection manager), which may be automatically encoded in an attribute of the secondary storage object and stored in a replica catalog at the protection manager. A secondary storage server constructs the secondary storage object using the encoded attribute and stores data replicated from the primary storage object. If the replica catalog is lost, the replica catalog may be automatically reconstructed by retrieving the encoded attribute and extracting the protection relationship information from the encoded attribute.