The disclosure herein describes generating a protected entity of a VCI. A state document is generated based on the metadata state of the VCI and an entity data stream is set to a URI associated with the data of the VCI. Components and associated URIs of the VCI are identified. A combined data stream is set to a URI configured to provide access to the state document, the entity data stream, and the URIs of the components of the VCI. A snapshot API for providing a snapshot of the state of the protected entity, a serialization API for providing a serialized version of the protected entity, and a de-serialization API for converting a serialized version of the protected entity into a de-serialized version of the protected entity are defined. The protected entity is configured to enable the data and metadata of the VCI to be efficiently backed up.