Good deduplication alternative for windows dedup/sdfs?

Discussion in 'Windows 10' started by Stannieman, Aug 16, 2015.

  1. Stannieman

    Stannieman MDL Guru

    Sep 4, 2009
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    #1 Stannieman, Aug 16, 2015
    Last edited: Aug 16, 2015
    Hi girls and guys

    Does anyone know a good and reliable data dedup solution? I'm going to upgrade to windows 10 so then the windows server package hack doesn't work anymore, but there are other reasons why I don't like windows dedup. SDFS on the other hand meets my requirements but doesn't work correctly atm.

    SDFS:
    - PRO: All stuff is stored in a folder and the actual volume is mounted to a drive letter. This makes it easy to backup the volume because you can copy the folder.
    - CON: when removing files and there are unused blocks, these are only removed when running the compact command, but this command doesn't work on windows (bug I guess).

    Windows dedup:
    PRO: it does work flawlessly
    CON: Always dedups a volume, not as easy to backup as SDFS.
    CON (temp): Not working on windows 10 yet (and even if it was it's still a dirty hack)
    CON (temp): No variable blocks but this will come in server 2016

    When you want to backup (file based, not image based) a windows volume it will restore the full files and you need to dedup the target volume too -> waste of resources and it takes a huge amount of time to backup over usb2.0.
    A solution is to use a VHD that's deduped, then backup the VHD. When a file is removed and the dedup vol is compacted I'd then have to shrink the VHD too, this is unnecessarily complex. That's why I like the folder based approach of SDFS. The only problem is that compacting an sdfs volume doesn't work yet.

    So does anyone know of some other solutions?

    EDIT: there are solutions that are used for storing backups, but I still want to access my files like if they were on a normal disk.
     
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