Deduplication Thought

[ekisner]

Just a thought for de-dup... I run many different backup jobs, as it means I can back up multiple VMs at any given time.

Maybe it already does this, but it would be interesting to have an option to create a "common backup area" where it could check for de-dup between individual backup jobs.

For example, say I have 2 jobs.. one for 6 domain controllers, and one for 6 SQL servers. Say they're all the same version of Windows.

The OS disks on all the domain controllers will be virtually identical to each other, as will the OS disks on the SQL servers. What I'm talking about would be to then de-dup the DC backup with the SQL backup and save some common space there (in this case, the OS disks between the DC and SQL servers would still share a lot of common areas). When backing up a hundred or so VMs across say 10-15 jobs, this could become a pretty significant disk saving measure.

Not sure if it's feasible, know it probably wouldn't be easy, but it would probably improve the de-dup even further (which, for the record, is already quite amazing).

One other option that would create this effect would be to use one job for all VMs.. but then it would take forever.. would be awesome to allow multiple VMs to back up at once.

Just a thought.

[foggy]

This is exactly what deduplicating storage appliances are designed for...

[nmace]

But that would still be a great feature to have for those of us who want/need multiple jobs but don't have a dedupe aware appliance. Like Ekisner, I'm relying on Veeam's dedupe tech for 100% of my dedupe.

[Gostev]

In that case, you should just use Windows Server 2012 built-in deduplication, it is excellent. I have covered that in one of the recent weekly forum digests...