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Deduplication in AB 12.5

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Data De-Duplication is currently considered a critical feature in whatever end-point protection strategy my company implements.  We don't want to be saving multiple images of Windows operating system files on our back-end - datacenter storage there is expensive and it is already redundant for Business Continuity practices and backed up daily.  A file image there quickly balloons to 8x (or more) it's actual size - we can't afford duplicates!

I apologize if  I am stating the obvious but I am new to this forum and want to preface the my questions with the appropriate emphasis.

  1. Am I correct that Data De-Duplication is only available in Acronis Backup 12.5 by using: the advanced agent, the previous version 11 backup file format, and only to a Storage Node running a Windows Operating System?
  2. Is it worth investigating backup up to SMB shares with an already De-Duping underlying file system like ZFS?
  3. Can satisfactory data set reduction be achieved by other means in AB 12.5 preferably on a Linux based host?
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Hi! 

1. So, deduplication on the storage level (between archives) is available in the centralized managed locations only. For that you'll need to have Acronis Backup Advanced license and Acronis Storage Node component installed on a machine with the Windows OS. Changing this is in our plans, but not for the near future..

On a positive note, with the introduction of archive 3 (backup format 12) we implemented deduplication of data within a single archive. But if you want to use dedup across multiple archives - the above requirements need to be fulfilled. 

2. I'm afraid, ZFS is also not supported :( data on such volumes will be skipped during backup (we have a feature request for this, internal ID ABR-111567, but currently it's not in the roadmap).

3. Probably worth testing backup of large data sets to archive 3 

I've just started a trial for the latest version and was pleasantly surprised that files on ZFS file system were backed up and I was also able to restore them to original location.

I didn't find anything mentioned in the release notes. Is it officially supported now?

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Posts: 0
Comments: 2016

Hello pa802015,

welcome to Acronis forums!

There should not be an issue with storing backups on ZFS backup locations and restoring from there. However, if you wish to backup data that is currently stored on ZFS file system, it will be backed up in sector-by-sector mode only.

Maria Belinskaya wrote:

Hello pa802015,

welcome to Acronis forums!

There should not be an issue with storing backups on ZFS backup locations and restoring from there. However, if you wish to backup data that is currently stored on ZFS file system, it will be backed up in sector-by-sector mode only.

That's what was odd to me regarding this thread, because with the latest Acronis agent/server version I was able to back up from ZFS and restore back to ZFS file system without any issue using the Linux agent. Backup location was deduplicated NTFS destination on Windows. Linux version was Ubuntu 18 with the ZFS on Linux version that comes with it, which I think is 0.7.6 or close to that.

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Posts: 0
Comments: 2016

Hello pa802015.

Thank you for sharing the detailed information.

I should add that for file-level backup there is no difference which file system is on the source and target drives.

If your backup was on a disk-level, then please collect and share with us your Acronis System Information gathered from this Ubuntu Agent. Please upload it onto an FTP link that I've sent you in a Private Message.

Hi, do you have a complete technical paper of the new archive 3, and all respective technical features (backup format 12)?

Hello Manoel!

I guess not. I was hoping to find out more about this as well (among other things) when I asked here: https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-cyber-backup-125/newer-version-deduplication-white-paper

-- Peter

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Posts: 0
Comments: 2016

Hello Manoel.

I also answered this question in the neighbour forum thread: https://forum.acronis.com/comment/534198#comment-534198