White Paper: The What, How, And Where Of Deduplication

Data deduplication is a method of reducing the amount of duplicate copies of data on your system. It makes a whole lot of sense—instead of storing multiple copies of an item, stores the data once. The system tracks where the data is, and when asked for it, provides it.

Data backup applications already do a simple version of deduplication. Typically, backup applications store all the data%mdash;a full backup%mdash;then store only changed data—incremental backups. This is much more efficient than completely full backups every night. Note, however, that this method operates solely on the basis of entire files. If your network has five copies of an identical 1 MB presentation, then the five copies are backed up—this example totals 5 MB of storage. This method of backup includes a lot of duplicate information.