Advantages of data deduplication

If you have been deploying data backups for some time, you must be very familiar with the  data deduplication technology, which is also known as the capacity optimization protection technology. It's pretty useful and powerful, and can greatly save your backup storage, right? But its value is actually far more than that, and that's something we're going to talk about deeper today.

What are the advantages of data deduplication?

It can provide larger backup capacity, achieve longer-term data retention, and also achieve continuous verification of backup data, improve the level of data recovery service, and facilitate the realization of data disaster recovery.

Greater backup capacity

Backup data contains too much redundancy, especially in a full backup of data. Although incremental backups only back up files that have changed, some redundant data blocks are often inevitably included. And that's when this kind of data reduction technology starts to shine. A data deduplication device can help you find duplicate files and data segments within or between files, or even within a data block, the actual amount of storage required is an order of magnitude less than the amount of data to be stored.

The working principle of data deduplication is to keep only a single copy of the backup data segment. One thing we have to know in advance is that when new data is written to the backup repository, it will be divided into variable-length data segments. At this point, users of a legacy backup solution may usually have to add another data deduplication device to compare the data segment in real-time with each segment already stored. But with Vinchin Backup & Recovery,  you can just simply enable the data deduplication feature from the backup job configure console and it will immediately start to work, as the software integrates this kind of data reduction technology into one solution. By detecting to exclude duplicate data blocks especially the zeroed data blocks, the uniqueness of each data segment in the backup repository can be highly ensured. 

The data is continuously validated

In a primary storage system, there is always a risk associated with logical consistency checking. If a software defect causes the wrong data to be written, the block pointers and bitmaps can be corrupted. If the file system is holding backup data, errors are difficult to detect until recovery, and there may not be enough time to correct errors by the time recovery is needed. 

Backing up data is the most valuable part of the backup effort. Backup data is not often accessed, and when it is needed, it often means that there has been a human or system failure that requires data recovery. To check the consistency of the file system during the recovery operation, you need to wait until the next system restart or take the system offline, which increases the risk unnecessarily. Therefore, a good deduplication device should have an end-to-end validation process.

Higher data recovery service level

Backup data recovery service level is the index to determine if a backup solution is good at performing accurate, fast and reliable data recovery.

Full backup and restore perform faster because incremental backups often scan the entire database to find changed blocks of data, and when recovery is needed, one full backup and multiple incremental backups are required to be used, which also affects recovery speed.

Why, then, do many businesses still choose incremental backups for data protection? Well, this is because the full backup requires more at the start, which refers to more backup time and backup space than an incremental backup.  

On the other hand, full backups and incremental backups at the data block level take up roughly the same amount of storage space on a daily basis. Compared with normal backup devices, backup devices using deduplication technology can save 95% of disk consumption when doing a full backup. 

Facilitate the realization of backup data disaster recovery

Data deduplication has a good capacity optimization capability for backup data, doing a full backup every day requires only a small number of disk increments, and it is the data after capacity optimization that is transmitted remotely over WAN or LAN, so network bandwidth can be greatly saved.

Today, many businesses see online backup data replication as an alternative to remote tape storage. In the replication solution, data is copied from the local primary disk to remote disk storage over a LAN or WAN. To enhance protection, companies can also increase the frequency of data synchronization, or configure remote sites to be full disaster recovery sites where business operations can be started when the primary site needs to be down for a period of time. By transferring a duplicate copy of backup data to a remote site, Vinchin Backup & Recovery can help build the remote DR center in a reliable way.

When selecting a product with the function of deduplication, customers should also investigate from the aspects of the capacity optimization algorithm, continuous data validation, data service level, disaster recovery efficiency, etc., and Vinchin Backup & Recovery with data deduplication feature can be one of the most trustworthy choices for efficient data backups.