My BE media server was used last night to test Deduplication. It was my first try at it. The server has C: and F:, F: being the larger volume. In BE I set thigns up to run a full backup of the entire system (physical server acting as Hyper-V host, and 4 VMs). My destination was the F: drive. I was hoping BE knows that even though the F: is part of the source of the backup, the dedupe folder on that same drive is the destination for this dedupe backup, so it hopefully knew not to go into a cycle and backup the destination as the soruce. It didn't seem to from what I can tell.
Three questions:
1. What is the best way to determine how much space the dedupe back up used? A partner question to this: is there any way to know exactly how well Deduplication worked? An indepedent tool, the Deduplication Assessment Tool can predict how good dedupe would be, does BE give information like this after a dedupe backup is done?
2. I now would like to reclaim the disk space used by this dedupe as it ate up about 700GB and hasn't released it even affer I canclled the job (I ran it, but canclled it this morning as it was still on Verify).
3. Will dedupe backup jobs act like tape jobs whereby if you tell it to Overwrite media, it's going to remove the previous dedupe job and put in the new one? So for this 700GB job, had I let it finish to it's considered intact, if I ran it again this evening would it first remove the existing backup, THEN start a new backup? Or it is like SSR where it first has to write the newe backup, and then later dleete the old job, requiring you to have double the storage space for thjis swap activity.
Thank you.