Using Data Deduplication to Shrink Backups

Dedupe is able to shrink backups and streamline data recovery, however, according to this Information Week report there are legitimate concerns about excessive reliance on deduplication appliances as part of the backup and disaster recovery process.

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"Some vendors dedupe the data stream as it's sent to the appliance and before it's written to disk, referred to as an in-line setup. Others perform post-process deduplication after data is written to disk. The best choice depends on your needs. In-line deduplication may have lower initial storage capacity requirements since a full 'un-deduped' copy of the data is never written to disk. Post-process deduplication requires more initial space, but it's more easily adapted to and integrated with various storage systems.

"Another advantage of dedupe is streamlined replication and disaster recovery capabilities. After an initial backup, only changed blocks are written to disk during subsequent jobs, consuming significantly less storage."

Read the Full Story at Information Week