Example embodiments of the present invention provide authenticated file system that provides integrity and freshness of both data and metadata more efficiently than existing systems. The architecture of example embodiments of the present invention is natural to cloud settings involving a cloud service provider and enterprise-class tenants, thereby addressing key practical considerations, including garbage collection, multiple storage tiers, multi-layer caching, and checkpointing. Example embodiments of the present invention support a combination of strong integrity protection and practicality for large (e.g., petabyte-scale), high-throughput file systems. Further, example embodiments of the present invention support proofs of retrievability (PoRs) that let the cloud prove to the tenant efficiently at any time and for arbitrary workloads that the full file system (i.e., every bit) is intact, leveraging integrity-checking capabilities to achieve a property that previous PoRs lack, specifically efficiency in dynamic settings (i.e., for frequently changing data objects).