With BackupAssist 10, when you send your backups to the cloud, your data is deduplicated. But what does that mean? In this article, we’ll cover what deduplication is, and how it saves you time, storage space, and money.
BackupAssist 10 Feature Series
- Full Feature List / Release Post
- The Cloud Backup Job
- Data Deduplication
- Cloud Independence
- Insulated Encryption
- Resilient Transfers
What is Data Deduplication?
When you get right down to it, data is just chunks of ones and zeroes. When you send them over the internet, a lot of the pieces you send are identical. This means if you’re doing a 1:1 transfer, you’re sending the same thing hundreds or even thousands of times.
Seems like a waste of bandwidth, right? Well, it’s also a waste when you think of the cloud storage space you’re paying for on the other end, filled with identical chunks of data. Each little bit of duplicate data adds up to a big extra cost to you, both in time backing up and in the money spent on storage and bandwidth.
Thankfully, data deduplication does away with all of that. It identifies which chunks of data are unique, and sends only that data.
To use a metaphor: imagine a piece of paper with some writing on it. Whenever you go to repeat a word that’s already written down, you instead put down a marker that points to where you already wrote it.
It’s simple, but deduplication saves you a ton of storage space. And it greatly speeds up the time taken to restore your data from the cloud.
So how much space does deduplication really save you, in actual figures? Well, look at the case study below.
Case Study Example
This is a Hyper-V Server, using BackupAssist’s Cloud Backup feature. The data has been deduplicated and then compressed before being sent to the cloud.
Original Size: 1.46 TB After Dedupe and Compression: 425 GB
Just with these two features alone (Deduplication and Compression), a 71% reduction was achieved. Needless to say, that’s a massive difference!
This sort of saving is compounded by the fact with BackupAssist 10, cloud backups are performed incrementally. This means you only send data that has changed since your last backup (Read all about Incremental Backups). Combined with deduplication, this decreases the data you need to send even further, and cuts down on your backup and recovery times.
Dedupe Your Data: See How Much Your Files Shrink!
Here’s an interesting test. Why not download the free trial of BackupAssist 10, pick some large files, and back them up to the cloud? That way you can see exactly how much space you’ll save through deduplicating your data.
Performing a Cloud Backup with BackupAssist 10 is remarkably straightforward, and if you already have an AWS or Azure account, takes seconds to set up. Read our guide on how to get started.
