Techniques are provided for producing a shadow directory structure for files or directories owned by servers whose parent directories are owned by different servers in a single distributed file system. For each file or directory whose parent directory resides on a remote server, the server owning the file or directory produces a shadow directory structure. The shadow structure may be used in a variety of ways, e.g., to access an orphan when the server owning the orphan's parent directory is offline (e.g., down, failed, or otherwise inaccessible), or to perform a partial file system consistency check (a partial fsck) to verify consistency of segments of the file system.