Data Deduplication has dramatically improved the value proposition of disk-based data protection as well as WAN-based remote- and branch-office backup consolidation and disaster recovery (DR) strategies. It identifies duplicate data, removing redundancies and reducing the overall capacity of data transferred and stored.

Some deduplication approaches operate at the file level, while others go deeper to examine data at a sub-file, or block, level. Determining uniqueness at either the file or block level will offer benefits, though results will vary. The differences lie in the amount of reduction each produces and the time each approach takes to determine what's unique.