I'm currently backing up three 2003 Servers to a share on a backup Server (running 2003) with the NTbackup tool. I am considering upgrading the backup server to Windows 2012 and am interested in the De-duplication feature.   The server's do a full backup every night with each server writing its own bkf file on the backup server with each backup being appended to the existing bkf file.

I am curious as to whether the de-duplication feature would be able to bring about a storage saving for this scenario?

I'm currently backing up three 2003 Servers to a share on a backup Server (running 2003) with the NTbackup tool. I am considering upgrading the backup server to Windows 2012 and am interested in the De-duplication feature.   The server's do a full backup every night with each server writing its own bkf file on the backup server with each backup being appended to the existing bkf file.

I am curious as to whether the de-duplication feature would be able to bring about a storage saving for this scenario?

1) BKF files are uncompressed by default so they are VERY GOOD candidates for deduplication. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTBackup

http://blogs.technet.com/b/filecab/archive/2012/05/21/introduction-to-data-deduplication-in-windows-server-2012.aspx

• Backup Support: We have support for fully-optimized backup using the in-box Windows Server Backup tool and we have several major vendors working on adding support for optimized backup and un-optimized backup. We have aselective file restore API to enable backup applications to pull files out of an optimized backup. 

2) Backup increments are results of a CBT (Changed Block Tracker) so they are VERY BAD candidates for deduplication. 

Hope this helped :)

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