We have a 6TB backup-to-disk system running with Backup Exec 2010. Each week, a full backup is carried out with differentials on the other days. We manage to get about four weeks of backups in there.
Firstly, am I right in thinking that the deduplication option would more effective use this backup-to-disk space? For example, in each of those four weeks, the same indentical 4GB file is backed up four times (space used = 16GB) but with deduplication only the first copy would be stored?
Secondly, if you enable de-duplication, does it have an immediate effect or does it take time for the deduplication to ripple through the B2D area?
The former would require a job to run on the existing B2D files, locating duplicates and marking up the BKF file as overwriteable.
The later would be far easier to implement as it just effects backups going forward.
If I were a betting man, I'd go for the later option ;-) Easier to code...