Hi all,

I have a question about how you should handle backups when running File
system de-duplication in Windows,

I have a customer who runs Hyper-V,  one guest in this HyperV setup is a
file server,  with disks to big to handle with TSM for HyperV, so that is
not an option (not that I think it should be used against file servers),

Now the customer has decided that to run data de-duplication inside Windows
to lower requirements for disk storage,   as far as I can tell TSM does not
have any API interface with Windows to handle this,  which means that files
need to be hydrated during backup.

This is very time consuming, and I am worried what happens when we need to
restore, (in time perspective)  as well as we need to have disk space for
fully de-duplicated storage during the restore process.

Also after the customer decided to activate file system de-duplication TSM
client assumed all the files had changed,  so right now we are taking a
full backup of the entire file server,   does anyone know what happens next
time we run incremental backups,  can I assume that TSM will take full
backups every time or?


Does IBM have any plans for supporting this dedup feature in Windows?  it's
been in Windows 2012R2 since it was released, so I would assume that there
are people using it out there,   or does the customer need to find
alternative ways to solve this.




Thanks in advance,

---
Arni