Is it possible to turn off deduplication?

[hyvokar]

Hi,

is it possible to turn off deduplication completely on Veeam Agent for windows? My data is pretty much uncompressable, but even with the loweset setting, VBR is using ~20-25% doing deduplication (which equals 5+ hours of extra backup time)

[jorgedlcruz]

Hello,
No, that is not possible as we will do data reduction anyways. But the closest option to have a "faster" backup with the less IO usage from the Agent will be selecting compression to None, and Storage at Local Storage Large blocks.

Please remember that changing these options will only be reflected on the next active full.

You have not mention what is your Backup Repository, or where is the bottleneck, it should say in the job or on the job report.

If data can not be compressed at all, and you have like 7TB of data, according to your previous post, then the speed it will depend of CPU/RAM of the server to protect, and of course the speed connectivity to the target, and the speed of disks there, etc.

A lot of things to consider, try those settings and let us know. Please let us know a bit as well hardware specs

[jorgedlcruz]

I know the dedupe ratio is always incredible high on VM Jobs, as similar blocks, imagine using same template image for the servers, are stored just once, etc.

For Agents if I am not mistaken, that dedup is part of our data reduction, shared the link above so you can read a bit more, but it only happens across disks on the server.

I would appreciate if a colleague with a bit more experience on how the dedup works for Agents, in case I have missed anything.

Thanks!

[hyvokar]

Hi, I've set compression to none and dedup to local. Machine to be backed up is a 12 core workstation, with ssd, and 32gb ram, Backup Server is 4vcpu/8gb. There is no indication of shortage of resources.
The problem currently seems that the backup simply "pauses" exactly every minute. At the beginning of the backup the pause is not noticeable, but after a while the pauses are a second long and at the end (i guess due the big backup file) the pauses are 15secs long. During the pause no data is being transmitted from workstation to VBR, but there's heavy traffic between VBR and storage (in and out). My guess is, that that's where deduplication happens and the backup target (8x 7200rpm disk nas) simply fails to keep up.

[jorgedlcruz]

Hello,
Thanks for the information. Yes, 7200rpm disks NAS sounds like a bottleneck, what is the networking between all the components? 1gbps?

I would recommend opening a Support Ticket if you think something is not behaving as expected.

Thank you

[hyvokar]

1gbit from workstation to backup server 2x 1gbit from backup server to nas.
I guess everything is working, I just would like to completely turn deduplication off, like I can with server backups

[jorgedlcruz]

Hello,
Thanks for the information, which exact option are you refering to on Servers, do gou mind sharing an screen?

I was doing a deep dive yesterday, and as said, Veeam will dedupe a block level on that very block, based on the block level selected, like Local Storage, etc. It will always try to avoid duplicated pointers wherever possible.

Kindly share the option you have on the server and not in workstation, I might be missing something.

Any chance you have opened a support ticket already, please share your case support number.

[hyvokar]

Sorry, my mistake. There is no such option in server version also :-/

So I guess there is no way to turn deduplication completely off?