Patent US 11,782,878

A deduplicated storage system storing objects receives a search term. Storage includes metadata and segments into which the objects have been split and deduplicated. The metadata includes fingerprint sequences according to which the segments should be assembled. A partial match is found when a prefix of the term is found at an end of a segment or a suffix is found at a beginning of the segment. A fingerprint of the segment having the partial match is recorded. A first sequence of fingerprints associated with a first object is read to check whether any fingerprints in the first sequence have been recorded. When a fingerprint in the sequence has been recorded, a check of a next fingerprint in the sequence is made to see if it has been recorded as having the partial match. If the next fingerprint has been recorded, the first object is reported as having the term.