Deduplication best practices

Follow these recommendations when using deduplication:

• When creating a deduplicating vault, place the vault and its deduplication database on different disks. This will make deduplication faster, because deduplication involves extensive simultaneous use of both the vault and the database.
• Indexing of a backup requires that the vault have free space with a minimum size of 1.1 multiplied by the size of the archive the backup belongs to. If there is not enough free space in the vault, the indexing task will fail and start again after 5–10 minutes, on the assumption that some space has been freed up as a result of cleanup or of other indexing tasks. The more free space there is in the vault, the faster your archives will reduce to the minimum possible size.
• When backing up multiple systems with similar content, back up one of the similar systems first, so that Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Storage Node indexes all the system's files as potential deduplication items. This will lead to faster backup processes and less network traffic (because of effective deduplication at source), regardless of whether the backups are performed simultaneously or not.

  Before starting the subsequent backups, make sure that the indexing task has finished deduplication of the first backup and is now idle. You can view the state of the indexing task in the list of tasks on Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Management Server.