10800: Acronis Backup & Recovery 10: Deduplication Best Practices

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Last update: 13-01-2012

How to set up deduplication in the most efficient way

This article applies to:

  • Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Advanced Server
  • Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Advanced Server - Small Business Server Edition
  • Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Advanced Workstation
  • Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Advanced Server - Virtual Edition

Introduction

Deduplication is a powerful technique allowing you to reduce the storage space required for backups. You should consider the following recommendations in order to use this tool efficiently.

Solution

Setting up a machine for Acronis Storage Node

  • Prepare a dedicated machine for Acronis Storage Node hosting deduplication vaults. Server operating system is preferred;
  • Multi-core machines are highly recommended;
  • Acronis Storage Node computer should have at least 2 GB of available physical memory for deduplication to function flawlessly.

Setting up a centralized managed vault with deduplication

  • The deduplication database should not reside on the C:\ volume and not on the same disk as the operating system. The reason is that the operating system has a lot of hard disk reads/writes which significantly slow down the deduplication performance.
  • Vault data and vault database folders should reside on different HDDs to avoid performance degradation;
  • If vault data is stored on a NAS, make network connection as fast as possible. Gigabit Ethernet is recommended;
  • If vault data is stored on locally attached HDDs, use the fastest controllers and high RPM drives. I/O is the main bottleneck for deduplication speed;
  • Having one deduplication vault per Acronis Storage Node is the best practice;
  • Make sure there is plenty of free space on the deduplication vault storage. You can estimate the recommended free space being equal to 110% of occupied space. For example, if the vault data occupies 10 GB, you should have 11 GB of free space.

Settings for client machines and backup plans/policies

  • Speed of backup to deduplicated vault can be increased by turning off deduplication at source (enable Deduplicate backup only after transferring it to the vault (do not deduplicate at source) option in Additional Settings of Backup options;
  • Client machines should be on fast Ethernet connection (Gigabit Ethernet is recommended);
  • Performance degradation starts to occur when deduplication database is larger than 20 GB. It is thus recommended to limit the number of client machines to 10-20 per deduplication vault.

Setting up scheduled tasks to the deduplication vault

  • The indexing task can process only 20 GB of unique data per hour or 500 GB per day. So, please plan the scheduled tasks accordingly: if overall data stream during the backup will be more than 500 GB per day, such backup tasks will fail. In this case it is necessary to change the schedule, i.e. set the scheduled tasks to start every 3 or 4 days instead of everyday backups.

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