Is Deduplication An Excuse To Be Lazy?

Posted by Howard Marks, Apr 2, 2008 11:09 PM

I was chatting with a three-letter storage vendor today about its upcoming entry into the data deduplication market. As its reps rattled off the usual benefits of data deduplication, they said administrators could stop running differential and incremental backups and just make full backups since the virtual tape library would deduplicate the data anyway. I see the logic, but the old-time admin in the back of my head is yelling "That's just wrong." What do you think?

The idea of only running one type of backup and letting the backup gods sort it all out later is appealing. That's one of the things I like best about the GoVault software I blogged about a few days ago. Keep it simple for the SOHO market.

I guess if you're backing up to an inline deduplicating target like a Data Domain or Overland VTL and aren't having problems meeting your backup window, just making full backups could make life easier. If I had a post-processing VTL like a Sepaton or Exabyte, it requires a bunch more disk for the temporary storage of data waiting to dedupe.

What do you think? Leave a comment.

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