Systems and methods are disclosed for efficiently creating a data fingerprint to identify or characterize contents of a data object by using a selection function to select a plurality of non-contiguous regions from the data object, the selected regions each having a small number of bytes relative to the number of bytes in the data object and being distributed throughout the data object so that the selected regions comprise a sparse subset of the data of the data object yet provide a significant probability of including bytes that change if the data object were modified; and performing a hash operation on the data to produce a fingerprint based on the sparse subset of the data object. The data fingerprint thereby efficiently provides an indication of the contents of the data object, so that comparing data fingerprints can determine if the data objects are different if the corresponding fingerprints are different.