About the deduplication scheduler

The deduplication scheduler is a daemon that runs on all nodes and is responsible for deduplicating data as per the user-specified schedule.

The deduplication scheduler does not start automatically after enabling deduplication on the file system. You have to externally start the scheduler.

Each file system can have its own schedule. The schedule and other configuration information for a given file system is stored within the file system. The location of the configuration file is lost+found/dedup/local_config.

The scheduler checks the configuration file every 30 minutes for changes and incorporates the changes if there are any. This periodic check also looks for newly mounted file systems. You can incorporate configuration changes immediately by restarting the scheduler.

When using the scheduler to deduplicate a file system's data automatically, the evaluation of changes in the file system is done by the File Change Log (FCL) feature. Scheduling deduplication to occur too infrequently in terms of days can cause the FCL to roll over, and thus the FCL feature can miss changes to the file system.

Symantec recommends that you schedule deduplication when the system activity is low. This ensures that the scheduler does not interfere with the regular workload of the system.