The present teaching relates to a method, system and programming for recovering a data storage. In response to a failure of the data storage, a last checkpointed version is retrieved from a checkpoint file created previously for the failure of the data storage. A recovery table is updated to indicate the last checkpointed version and an incarnation number indicating a number of previous recovery of the data storage. The data storage is recovered based on the recovery table. A version number of the last checkpointed version is reset to zero upon a successful recovery of the data storage. The incarnation number is incremented.