What Is Inline Deduplication?

Inline deduplication is like a magical fairy who pops into your data backup system and erases the extra stuff. No, not like the fairy who makes your teeth fall out. It is like the fairy who knows that there's no need for you to send a whole file over again just because it has changed a little bit. Inline deduplication is an integral part of many data backup systems. It's designed to detect redundant data and eliminate it from the transfer process so that only the new and different data needs to be sent. It means you can reduce the time it takes to send your backups over a network, store them on disk, and reduce how much space they take up. Inline deduplication systems look for duplicate chunks of data inside data sets being transferred and create a single copy of the data instead of storing each piece individually. This process is usually done during a data backup when the data being backed up is being transferred from one location to another, and there's no need to keep multiple copies of the same data. Deduplication is all about finding duplicates and cutting them out, but in an ideal world, we'd be able to do that before the data leaves the source. That's what inline deduplication does: it checks for duplicates as it passes through the pipe, so your backup destination doesn't have to do any extra work. That can be a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand, slowing down the process of getting data from A to B is never ideal; on the other hand, if you're already doing it anyway, why not take advantage of that time to scrub out any unnecessary bloat? Inline deduplication relies on processes that get in between the data origin servers and the data backup destinations, or in other words, functions during the process (rather than after). It can mean that inline deduplication can slow down data backups or otherwise impede the process; however, it also means that Will already Scrub the final result of redundant or inefficient data.