ken2johnson Posted November 13, 2012 Report Share Posted November 13, 2012 Retrospect 8 Server for Windows is being marketed as having Automatic Deduplication features. So, here are some questions about this. Is this a new feature in version 8 or just new marketing for something that was in previous versions? How do we know if this "automatic" feature is running? Is it really automatic or is there some check box we need to set or some specific way of doing backups to take advantage of this? In older forum posts, I read that you need to backup several clients to the same backup set in order to get deduplication. Is that still the case or will this work across multiple backup sets? Any help with these questions is appreciated. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lennart_T Posted November 14, 2012 Report Share Posted November 14, 2012 It isn't new. Maybe it is improved? I have no idea. It is always running. In older version you can't even turn it off and I don't think you can in version 8. You may limit it's usefulness by altering the default setting. In older version there is a checkbox for only matching same location (the same folder). It is really automatic. It doesn't work across multiple backup sets. (It would be a very bad thing to do as it would be impossible to get complete backups in a single backup set. What if some files was only stored in ANOTHER backup set? Disaster! ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richy_Boy Posted November 19, 2012 Report Share Posted November 19, 2012 Yes, nothing has changed at all in the dedupe features - I had rather hoped that Delta backups would be in v8 as just about every other backup solution has been supporting this for 5 years now. It's a shame really.. many of the features of v8 really should have been in the product 5 years ago Rich Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ken2johnson Posted November 19, 2012 Author Report Share Posted November 19, 2012 This is pretty much what I expected. I don't think we are going to have multiple computers backup to one backup set because of the difficulty of removing the old snapshots for computers that are decommissioned. If they somehow make that easier then we may start combining computers into 1 backup set. That's the only way I see that we can fully benefit from the de-duplication feature. With each computer in its own backup set we are basically getting Incremental backups for each computer with no cross-computer de-dupe. Does that sound correct to everyone? Thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lennart_T Posted November 20, 2012 Report Share Posted November 20, 2012 Yes, that sounds correct. Yes, I wish it was easier to remove old snapshots. It is possible to "transfer snapshots" and select all snapshots except the decommissioned computers' snapshots. It doesn't have to be done every time a computer is decommissioned, but maybe when five computers have been decommissioned. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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