Forum Discussion
I am amazed by the efficiency of BE's dedup process. The answer is yes except when dealing with compressed files.
BE will deduplicate all your backup jobs regardless of when or the type. The dedup storage treats duplicate blocks of data from a single host the same way it treats them from multiple hosts. To the dedup storage, when data comes in, if a block matches something already in storage it's deduplicated.
Because BE is so incredibly efficient we chose a slightly different approach to offsite storage. We chose to use a huge dedup array and set the retention period to a year or more. In this way, we always have local backup sets to restore from. Each month we backup the entire BE server including the system state where the deduplicated data exists. When backing up this way, the data stays deduplicated and streams in one shot to multiple tapes we send offsite. We lose the ability to restore individual files from offsite tapes but our offsite container is a whole lot smaller and still serves the purpose of having an offsite copy of everything in the event of a disaster.
Looking at our storage today, it only takes 4 tapes get all the dedup storage. If we backed up all the storage un-deduplicated it would require 14 tapes per month. It saves us a huge amount of time and tape storage to do it this way.
Its almost a GFS backup like I'm used to minus the yearly points in time. If I could request a feature from Symantec for BE2016 it would be the ability to retain catalogs from the system state so we can restore individual files rather than a complete restore of the server from tape if all we want is a single file.
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