Housekeeping of quarantined container indexes in a deduplication storage system

A method comprising:

• receiving, by a storage controller of a deduplication storage system, a command to perform housekeeping of a first backup item stored in a persistent storage of the deduplication storage system;
• in response to a receipt of the command, loading, by the storage controller, a manifest from the persistent storage into a memory, wherein the manifest is included in the first backup item;
• loading, by the storage controller, a container index from the persistent storage into the memory, wherein the manifest references the container index;
• removing, by the storage controller, a reference to the manifest from a backreference list in the container index;
• determining, by the storage controller, whether the container index is quarantined;
• in response to a determination that the container index is a quarantined container index, determining, by the storage controller, whether the backreference list in the quarantined container index is empty;
• and
• in response to a determination that the backreference list in the quarantined container index is empty, deleting, by the storage controller, the quarantined container index from the persistent storage of the deduplication storage system.

A non-transitory machine-readable medium storing instructions that upon execution cause a processor to:

• receive a command to perform housekeeping of a first backup item stored in a persistent storage of a deduplication storage system;
• in response to a receipt of the command, load a manifest from the persistent storage into a memory, wherein the manifest is included in the first backup item;
• load a container index from the persistent storage into the memory, wherein the manifest references the container index;
• remove a reference to the manifest from a backreference list in the container index;
• determine whether the container index is quarantined;
• in response to a determination that the container index is a quarantined container index, determine whether the backreference list in the quarantined container index is empty;
• and
• in response to a determination that the backreference list in the quarantined container index is empty, delete the quarantined container index from the persistent storage of the deduplication storage system.