Deduplication use cases

The following list includes several cases for which you would want to use the deduplication feature:

Home directories

User home directories often have multiple versions of the same files or file that have similar content, and therefore have redundant data that you can deduplicate.

Source code directories

Source code repositories usually have multiple files with incremental changes. The data that does not change from one file to the next can be deduplicated.

vmdk files

Once several virtual machines are cloned by using the FileSnap feature, the cloned virtual machines are subjected to operating system and security patches over their lifetime. As individual virtual machines cloned from a common source - the golden image - deviate from the source as a result of such activity, there is large amount of common content between them. Over time, this results in the loss of the initial storage savings. Deduplication of the new blocks added to these files restores the storage savings.