Protecting deduplicated volumes

The process to protect a volume with data deduplication is the same as protecting a normal volume. However, you must consider the following actions when you protect a volume that has the deduplication feature enabled.

Important
Protection of volumes with data deduplication enabled is supported only in System Center 2012 SP1 DPM.

• You must enable the Data Deduplication role on the DPM server to protect deduplicated volumes.
  
  
• If the entire volume is protected, then DPM provides only optimal protection. If only partial deduplicated volume is protected, then DPM will provide normal backup.
  
  
• If you protect data to tape, the data will be stored in unoptimized form.
  
  
• End-user recovery for deduplicated volumes will be done in unoptimized form.
  
  
• Protection for volumes with data deduplication enabled is not supported for online backup to Windows Azure Online Backup.
  
  

When you protect a volume with data deduplication enabled, DPM leverages the benefits of the feature. Specifically, the data from such a volume is stored optimally, and network transfers of the also happen in an optimized form.

The process to recover a volume with data deduplication enabled is the same as recovering a normal volume. However, you must consider the following actions when you perform volume recovery.

• To do full volume (optimal) recovery, you must recover to an empty and formatted volume, and you should not enable the deduplication feature on the target volume.
  
  
• If you recover an item by using Item-level recovery, it will be recovered in an unoptimized state.
  
  
• If you recover the entire deduplicated volume, the recovery will be optimized. If you recover only selected files and folders, , the recovery will not be optimized.
  
  
• You cannot recover a deduplicated volume to a computer that does not have the Windows Server 8 operating system.
  
  

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