I’m always puzzled when a customer tells me that they “need deduplication to run my backups better.” This drives me nuts. Deduplication in and of itself doesn’t make your backups run better. In fact some technologies make backups and restores take a lot longer. These customers aren’t really thinking about the root causes of their problems. They are like patients who see an ad for a prescription medication on TV and decide they need some. When the doctor asks why, the response is “because the ad sounded like something that will make me feel better.” Sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it? Well, that is no different from the dedupe statement above.

The simple reality is that, like the prescription drugs on TV, dedupe is not a silver bullet. It solves specific problems such as retention and reduction in $/GB. If that is your problem, then by all means please look at dedupe. But please, understand the problem you are trying to solve. Trust me, you don’t want to be the guy taking the drugs just because they sound good on TV.