1. A computer-implemented method, comprising: at a computing device: receiving a request to generate a revision of a virtual file system in at least one storage device, wherein the virtual file system has a hierarchical tree structure including a plurality of tree nodes, each tree node having associated metadata and corresponding to a respective component of the virtual file system; for each tree node: serializing the tree node's associated metadata into an object; generating an object ID from the serialized object; storing the object in the storage device if the object ID is not found in an object-storage mapping table associated with the virtual file system; and inserting the object ID into the object-storage mapping table; and storing the object-storage mapping table in the storage device.