1. A non-transitory computer-readable medium having stored thereon instructions that, when executed by a processor, perform a method associated with a local file system, the method comprising: at a first time, creating and exporting to a cloud-based storage a first structured data representation corresponding to a first version of the local file system, wherein the first structured data representation corresponds to a complete copy of the first version of the local file system at a point-in-time and comprises, for at least one file of the local file system, a tree having a root element that includes all the data from one or more inode or inode-equivalent data structures of the local file system describing the file, and at least one object that contains at least a portion of the file, and one or more directory elements associated with the root element; and upon a change within the local file system, creating and exporting to the cloud-based storage a second structured data representation corresponding to a complete copy of the second version of the local file system at a point-in-time, the second structured data representation differing from the first structured data representation up to and including the root element of the second structured data representation; wherein at least one of the first and second structured data representations is self-contained in that it includes or points to all data structures and data needed to reconstruct the local file system at a point-in-time; wherein the cloud-based storage is a write-once data store.