User`s guide
67  Copyright © Acronis, Inc., 2000-2010 
  The deduplicated items that have changed are not identical anymore and therefore will not be 
deduplicated. 
2.12.6.4  Deduplication best practices 
Follow these recommendations when using deduplication: 
  When creating a deduplicating vault, place the vault and its deduplication database on different 
disks. This will make deduplication faster, because deduplication involves extensive simultaneous 
use of both the vault and the database. 
  Indexing of a backup requires that the vault have free space with a minimum size of 1.1 
multiplied by the size of the archive the backup belongs to. If there is not enough free space in 
the vault, the indexing task will fail and start again after 5–10 minutes, on the assumption that 
some space has been freed up as a result of cleanup or of other indexing tasks. The more free 
space there is in the vault, the faster your archives will reduce to the minimum possible size. 
  When backing up multiple systems with similar content, back up one of the similar systems first, 
so that Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Storage Node indexes all the system's files as potential 
deduplication items. This will lead to faster backup processes and less network traffic (because of 
effective deduplication at source), regardless of whether the backups are performed 
simultaneously or not. 
Before starting the subsequent backups, make sure that the indexing task has finished 
deduplication of the first backup and is now idle. You can view the state of the indexing task in 
the list of tasks on Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Management Server. 
2.12.6.5  Deduplication ratio 
The deduplication ratio shows the size of archives in a deduplicating vault in relation to the size they 
would occupy in a non-deduplicating vault. 
For example, suppose that you are backing up two files with identical content from two machines. If 
the size of each file is one gigabyte, then the size of the backups in a non-deduplicating vault will be 
approximately 2 GB, but this size will be just about 1 GB in a deduplicating vault. This gives a 
deduplication ratio of 2:1, or 50%. 
Conversely, if the two files had different content, the backup sizes in non-deduplicating and 
duplicating vaults would be the same (2 GB), and the deduplication ratio would be 1:1, or 100%. 
What ratio to expect 
Although, in some situations, the deduplication ratio may be very high (in the previous example, 
increasing the number of machines would lead to ratios of 3:1, 4:1, etc.), a reasonable expectation 
for a typical environment is a ratio between 1.2:1 and 1.6:1. 
As a more realistic example, suppose that you are performing a file-level or disk-level backup of two 
machines with similar disks. On each machine, the files common to all the machines occupy 50% of 
disk space (say, 1 GB); the files that are specific to each machine occupy the other 50% (another 
1 GB). 
In a deduplicating vault, the size of the first machine's backup in this case will be 2 GB, and that of 
the second machine will be 1 GB. In a non-deduplicating vault, the backups would occupy 4 GB in 
total. As a result, the deduplication ratio is 4:3, or about 1.33:1. 










