The patent was originally granted in 2006 to Veritas and has been in possession of Symantec according to the USPTO records at the time of this writing. Stec IP says it is the rightful holder of the patent and apparently acquired the patent in recent days.
Entitled "Replica synchronization using copy-on-read technique", the patent covers a
"method, system, and computer program […] to synchronize data maintained in separate storage areas using a copy-on-read technique. The separate storage areas may be distributed across a network, and the replicas of the data may be used for backup and/or disaster recovery purposes. Storage objects containing data and information relevant to managing the data by a particular application are identified, and only those storage objects are read. Data contained in the storage objects read are then copied to the replica storage area. This process avoids reading non-useful data, making the synchronization more efficient and conserving bandwidth of connections over which the data are sent."
Spec IP claims that five related patents 6,738,799; 5,495,607; 6,963,908; 5,825,891 and 6,925,481, four of which were in owned by Symantec prior to the lawsuit, substantiate its patent infringement claim. the company asked the court to be awarded damages, costs, expenses, and pre-judgment and post-judgment interest. There is no request to stop Apple from infringing the patents in question.
Stec IP filed unrelated patent infringement lawsuits against Oracle and Amazon as well.