Most Backup solutions today store Gigabytes and Terabytes of data over and over again at each backup, creating multiple copies of data that might change only incrementally over time.

Using iStor data de-duplication, only changes to that data will be stored, while redundant data is replaced with a pointer to the unique data copy.

You can hear a lot about Data De-duplication lately and some are describing it as a new, emerging technology. It may be new... for some, but at iStor, we are using Data De-Duplication for almost 10 years.

What is Data De-Duplication?

Data de-duplication (also called »single instance storage«) essentially refers to the elimination of duplicated elements in many copies and versions of data. With use of data de-duplication only one unique instance of data is stored, resulting in less data to protect and manage.

How it is done?
There are several levels, or technics, of de-duplication - file level, block level and byte level.

File level de-duplication searcehs for duplicated files acros multiple servers and workstations and eliminate them so that only one uniqu file is backed-up.

Let’s assume that each block represent 1 GB file and blocks with the same color represent duplicated files. iStor De-Duplication eliminates all duplicated files so that only one instance of each file is stored. By using iStor De-Duplication, raw capacity of files needed to be backed up is decreased from 24 GB to only 9 GB.

Block level de-duplication breakes file into descreet blocks of information. Block size depands on file size and type and it is typicaly between 1 and 1024Kb. Block technology compares each block of a modified file with the corespondent block in the previosu version and extracts a copy of that block.