Saturday 21 December 2013

Store less, backup lesser – The Art of Deduplication


Deduplication is not a new concept though the term is relatively new. It originated more from the backup prospective though it has now got good footholds in many IT components.
I know and have been using for over a decade backup technologies that would backup only unique emails and files, and subsequently backup only delta changes. Being the only one doing that, they used their own language. They did not coin the word deduplication. Now everyone does that and calls it File level deduplication. This approach served good for desktop and laptop backups. Then this technology progressed, the current being block level deduplication. This recognises unique blocks of data and ensures that one block gets backed up only once, thereby reducing the amount of data travelling and getting backed up.
Like any other process, deduplication also needs resources to do what it is meant for. Various applications offer various forms like source based, target based and inline deduplication. Each one of them has their own working mechanisms and pros and cons. In the following series of blogs we will discuss the various methods of deduplication along with their pros and cons.

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