I totally get what you mean — over time VM disks and backups tend to pile up, and storage pressure becomes a real challenge in virtualized environments. Many admins run into this, so you’re definitely not alone.
One of the most effective approaches is deduplication:
How it works: It compares VM backups or disk blocks at the fingerprint level and only stores unique data blocks.
Advantages: In virtualized setups, it’s very effective because many VMs share the same OS, patches, and applications.
In practice: Deduplication works best in backup scenarios, often reducing storage consumption by 50%–90%. For live/production disks it can add performance overhead, so it’s usually applied to backups and archives rather than primary storage.中文
