The Plain-English Guide to Data Deduplication

Nowadays, with so much critical information saved on our computer systems, we've learned to backup data regularly -- including our email inboxes, our Word documents, our photos, and entire folders of old work.

It's typically a ton of data. And, since we usually backup and save our data on auto-pilot, we might not realize just how much has been re-copied and re-saved, time and time again.

Unfortunately, over time, our data storage becomes unnecessarily burdened with redundant copies of data -- this could cost your company money, as data requirements become larger, or time, as processing time becomes slower.

This is where data deduplication comes in.

What is data deduplication?

Data deduplication is the process of eliminating redundant copies of data and reducing processing time for a software system. Every time you backup your software system, you're copying and storing large data sets. After a while, this requires an unmanageably large amount of data storage. Data deduplication optimizes your data storage by ensuring only one unique instance of data is copied and stored.

Andrew Le, an IT Helpdesk Technician at HubSpot, further explains the importance of data deduplication for a business looking to grow -- "[Data deduplication] really improves scaling and efficiency when pulling data from one source. If you have lots of the same data in different spaces, your entire system can be slowed down."

To ensure you're optimizing your data backup storage, we've cultivated a list of the best data deduplication software you can use to minimize unnecessary data copies, today.

Data Deduplication Software

1. HubSpot's Deduplication Feature

If you use HubSpot's CRM to manage your contacts, you'll be impressed to find out you can also use HubSpot's machine learning-powered deduplication feature to keep your contact database clean. HubSpot contacts can be deduplicated by a usertoken set with a cookie in their web browser or email address -- additionally, contacts, companies, deals, and tickets can be deduplicated using a unique object ID.

2. Barracuda Backup Deduplication

With a 9.1 user rating out of 10 on TrustRadius, Barracuda Backup is a good option, offering a robust, secure, fully-integrated data deduplication solution. Their tool can help your business reduce bandwidth requirements and backup costs. Additionally, Barracuda is a good option if your business needs to protect multiple sites, since its cloud storage technology helps distributed networks stay protected.

3. Avamar

Avamar, a solution from Dell EMC, provides variable-length deduplication, which reduces backup time by only storing unique daily changes while simultaneously maintaining daily backups. Avamar is an efficient, secure option and is particularly useful for virtual environments, remote offices, and enterprise applications.

4. HPE StoreOnce

HPE StoreOnce, a solution from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, offers disk-based backup, deduplication, and secure long-term data storage. Their deduplication software is equipped for virtual backup machines in small remote offices, and equally capable of handling high-performance dedicated applications for larger businesses. Ultimately, this is an impressive tool to help you keep your data secure and efficient as you scale-up.

5. Exagrid EX Series

Exagrid implements a highly efficient approach to data deduplicaton that allows six times the backup performance, and up to 20 times the restore and VM boot performance. With Exagrid, you can backup your data straight onto a disk without inline deduplication processing, enabling a shorter backup window.