Certain embodiments disclosed herein reduce or eliminate a communication bottleneck at the storage manager by reducing communication with the storage manager while maintaining functionality of an information management system. In some implementations, operations performed as part of a backup process may be stored in transaction logs. These transaction logs may include information about a transaction performed between the client computing system and the network storage that hosts the backup of the client computing system. The transaction logs may be provided to a secondary storage system that can be used to form a backup index. The backup index may be used to facilitate accessing the data stored at the network storage. Advantageously, generating the transaction logs and separating the generation of the backup index from the backup process can reduce resource usage during performance of the backup and speed up the backup process while further reducing interaction with the storage manager.