[linux-lvm] Data deduplication in LVM?

[Les Mikesell]

Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk wrote:
> On 11. juni. 2009, at 00.30, Stuart D. Gathman wrote:
> 
>> One OSS backup product that does
>> deduplication is BackupPC (written in Perl).  In the backup server, 
>> every file
>> gets hard linked to a name in a special directory that is its md5 
>> checksum
>> (plus some fiddly logic to handle metadata)
> 
> 
> This sounds like file-level deduplication. Most storage systems sing 
> dedup, uses block-level dedup. NetApp is one example; they dedup 
> everything with 4k blocks, doing the actual deduplication at night.

Yes, it is a different concept.  However it does work very well when you 
are storing your backups on a filesystem without block-level dedup.  And 
that is probably the place where you have the most redundancy - or if 
you don't already, you'll be able to store a much longer history.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com