Item-Level Restore for Volumes with Windows Deduplication

This article covers the following topics:

• Item-Level Restore Support for Volumes with Windows Deduplication
• Windows Deduplication Explained

Item-Level Restore for Volumes with Windows Deduplication

Starting from version 6.3.2, Backup for Windows supports item-level restore of volumes with Windows deduplication.

What is Windows Deduplication?

Windows deduplication is a feature that reduces the impact of redundant data on storage costs. Once enabled, Windows deduplication reduces the used space per volume by excluding duplicated parts on a volume.

Duplicated volume dataset parts are stored once and optionally are compressed for additional savings. Windows deduplication optimizes redundancy without compromising data integrity.

Once enabled for a volume, Windows deduplication runs in the background to:

• Identify repeated patterns across files on that volume
• Seamlessly move those portions, or chunks, with special pointers called reparse points that point to a unique copy of that chunk.

This occurs in the following steps:

1. Scan the file system for files that match the optimization policy.
2. Break files into variable-size chunks.
3. Identify unique chunks.
4. Place chunks in the chunk store and optionally compress.
5. Replace the original file stream of now optimized files with a reparse point to the chunk store.

When optimized files are read, the file system sends the files with a reparse point to the Data Deduplication file system filter (dedup.sys).

System Requirements

Windows deduplication works on the following operating systems:

• Windows Server 2016
• Windows Server 2019.