De-duplication on file-level possible?

[Joe99]

Hello forum

I am contemplating about setting-up a FreeNAS-box

In the past, i made a mix of full- and incremental-backups of my PC's hd and saved the content to a RAR-file. Mostly not even the timestamps(MACE) of the files did change, but sometimes the file-name did change but not the content of the file.

Question:
Can the dedup-feature of ZFS be used to remove such dup's (of course after de-raring the archives first and exporting the content of the archives to different folders)?


Thank you very much in advance for every feedback!

Joe

 

[m0nkey_]

He's an Oracle blog post on the subject: https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/entry/zfs_dedup

Note there is a rather large overhead in FreeNAS when using ZFS de-duplication. The memory requirement moves from 1GB RAM per 1TB storage to 5GB RAM to 1TB storage.

 

[Sakuru]

What I do is take a snapshot and overwrite the existing data. WAY more efficient than deduplication, and it's easy enough to retrieve an old version of something.