Systems and methods are provided herein for establishing data constructs necessary for efficient and transparent tiering of data from local storage to cloud storage, and there use in transferring data to and from cloud storage. Files data can split into chunks and stored as individual objects in cloud storage. A stub file can replace the local file in local storage and describe a mapping of cloud objects that contain data to specific regions of the file. Upon creation of the stub and transfer of data to cloud storage, local storage capacity previously dedicated to file data can be freed for other uses.