Deduplicaton on a existing depot

Hello Markus,

Thank you for using [[http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/ | Acronis Corporate Products]]

You are unable to add the deduplication for an existing vault. You should create the deduplicating managed vault from the scratch and create a separate backup plan. I will describe the steps you should perform to create a deduplicating managed vault:

1. Install Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Storage Node and add it to the management server.

2. Create the deduplicating managed vault on the storage node.

3. Install the Acronis Deduplication add-on to the agent on all machines that will back up to the deduplicating vault.

4. Ensure that the backup plans you create use the managed vault as destination for the backup archives.

Thank you.

Can the archives in the old "existing depot" be exported into the new de-dupe'd vault? (Would that new storage-node then apply de-duplication to those backups?)

Hello citizen,

Thank you very much for your post.

I am afraid our software was not designed to export archives from the old managed vault to the new managed deduplicating vault. You will have to perform the steps that Oleg mentioned in the above post, in order to work with deduplication.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can help you with.

Too bad... Can it be done INDIRECTLY instead? That means:

Can the archives in the old "existing depot" be exported into AN UN-MANAGED VAULT, AND THEN FROM THERE IMPORTED INTO the new de-dupe'd vault? (Would that new storage-node then apply de-duplication to those backups?)

Hello citizen,

Thank you for getting back to me. I will try to answer your questions as best as I can.

You can definitely try and place the backup files into the new deduplication vault, however, the Acronis software database will not be updated with the information about the new backup files, and the software will simply not detect them. Currently there is no import feature within the software itself.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can do for you.

From the UG - ( 6.7 )
When the console is connected to a managed machine, you can export an archive or part of an archive *to and from any location* accessible to the agent residing on the machine. These include ... and, in the advanced product versions, managed and unmanaged centralized vaults.
However in 6.7.5. Location selection, (1) Selecting the export destination, the only centralized vault mentioned is centralized *unmanaged* vault.
So my bet is that it's possible even directly from existing centralized location to new location with deduplication.

Dev-anon,

Thank you for your kind and reasonable comment. 

You are perfectly correct, we can export the archive from the personal vault to the vault with the deduplication, but unfortunately we cannot guarantee that deduplication feature will be successfully assigned to the exported image. This scenario wasn't tested yet and is reported to be unforeseen.

I entirely understand how inconvenience it may be, so I have just contacted our Experts' team for them to test this scenario and provide us with the solid answer. I will keep you posted!

Should you have any further questions - just let us know, we will be glad to help!

Thank you for understanding!

"I entirely understand how inconvenience it may be, so I have just contacted our Experts' team for them to test this scenario and provide us with the solid answer. I will keep you posted!

Should you have any further questions - just let us know, we will be glad to help!"

I appreciate Acronis's followup to this issue. Please consider importing a "Feature Request".

Further questions:

If encryption or password protection is involved, what steps would I take to get those imported & de-dupe'd?

(Does de-dupe work on a block level, for example the blocks that are unchanged between multiple similar revisions of large files, in different subdirectories?)

Dear citizen,

Thank you for your comment and for your question.

First of all: good news, community! I received a reply from the Development team, and yes, deduplication will perfectly work with the exported images, so feel free to move the archives if needed.

Citizen, thanks again for the questions, I will be glad to answer: 

deduplication is performed on disk blocks (block-level deduplication) and on files (file-level deduplication), for disk-level and file-level backups respectively. We do not expect any issues with exporting the encrypted or password protected archives, but you will face several issues with deduplicating them due to the feature restrictions: please kindly check this article for more details.

Let me know in case something is unclear or you have any further questions - I enjoy answering and will definitely assist you!

Thank you!