METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR DECENTRALIZED, INVERTIBLE GENERATION OF BOUNDED-LENGTH GLOBALLY UNIQUE REPLICA IDENTIFIERS

A method (and system) for uniquely identifying one of a plurality of replicas of data, includes creating a second replica from a first replica, and computing a replica identifier of a bounded length for a second replica by applying a uniform transformation to a replica identifier of the first replica, without central coordination of identifier generation. In a preferred embodiment, the uniform transformation has an inverse, which can be applied to the identifier of the second replica to recover the identifier of the first replica. The second replica is created when its replica identifier is calculated to be an integer in a predetermined range.