A system and method for deferring an invalidation walk-through of a volume in memory and a later invalidation walk-through of inodes the volume are described herein. Node A may store volume information for one or more volumes to memory including inodes of the volume storing data for the volume. Node A performs a primary procedure that may include removing volumes from the memory, such as a procedure that transfers ownership of the volumes to node B. Removing a volume from memory comprises removing its volume information from memory. Node A performs an invalidation deferment procedure that marks each volume as stale for preventing data of the volumes to be served and sends a completion message to node B which begins serving data of the volume. After node B begins serving data of the volume, node A performs an invalidation walk-through procedure to remove inodes of the volume from memory.