You might be skeptical as to what type of files are being backed up or stored but, data duplication on your hard drives, servers, clouds, or even data centers is inevitable. How? For instance, imagine that you have received a video on your WhatsApp or any social media platform and, you have also received the same video through email from a different person. Hence, the platform, application, or even the file name may be different but the video data is the same. This leads to data duplication. Likewise, saving photos or videos from social media applications to the device’s local folder is another example. The media file that is stored on your local storage is already present on the in-app storage as well.
Without realizing the amount of data duplicates, the user tends to buy additional drives or cloud subscriptions to store more data. It is estimated that by 2021, Data storage units’ market revenue will be 78.1bn USD. Close to 50% of the corporate data is stored on Cloud servers for information archiving.
You might be wondering how do the clients or the users manage to keep the duplication level low or NIL. Read the next section to know more.
Applications & Utilities Used by Users to Manage Duplicate Data
- Remo Duplicate File Remover
- CloneSpy
- Dupscout
- Duplicate Finder
- Auslogics Duplicate File Finder
The advancements in the Deduplication process have come a long way when compared to the early 2000s. Many cloud and data centers have also started including Deduplication backup as an individual option itself. This option allows you to minimize storage size by detecting redundant and identical data and addressing these files after the unique data has been successfully backed up.
Deduplication also reduces the network load and distribution of the bandwidth. If the redundant files are not backed up again, the network bandwidth increases and allows to backup of unique data in less time.
Cloud Storage platforms like Google One, Google Drive, Google Photos, Dropbox, Box, and Remo Backup are also planning to add a Deduplication backup facility into their applications or interface.
How Does Data Deduplication Work?
The most common Deduplication technique compares data by splitting them into blocks. Each block’s uniqueness is calculated through a specific hash value and if there are any similar hash value files, they will be skipped and will not be stored in the drive or data center.
For example, if there are 10 virtual storage drives that are being backed up using the Deduplication method and the process has found 8 blocks with a similar hash value, only one block is sent for storage and the rest are skipped. This methodology and algorithm of skipping the same value blocks saves a lot of storage space and reduces network traffic. File sharing between co-workers or organizations is done through Microsoft OneDrive. More than 70% of people have adopted Microsoft OneDrive as their default file-sharing platform. However, there are many other more efficient/ complex deduplication techniques that are being tested and used.
Once the network traffic is reduced with the inculcation of new techniques, hopefully, more bandwidth can be used for other processes and make the internet work faster. Luckily, the maintenance of data storage has been simplified as the new data storage components/ hubs are being built with more features. Data storage units like NVRAM, Storage-class memory (SCM), and NVMeOF.
Conclusion:
What Are the Advantages of These New/ Upcoming Storage Containers?
One of the major concerns is that the more data is stored, the more deduplication will happen. Hence the only way is to upgrade to the new or upcoming storage facilities. It is found that only 35% of the big-scale companies are using traditional storage methods. the rest 75% of the companies have switched to cloud-storage or private servers.
NVRAM (Non-Volatile Random-Access-Memory) is known for storing data regardless if the power supply is off or on by the laptop, MacBook, or desktop computer. NVRAM is like a flash memory that saves and stores data while it is running or being used. NVRAM also requires very little installation space which makes it faster.
SCM (Storage-Class Memory) is a storage memory component that has microsecond latency. This makes it very fast when compared to the other memory unit drives. However, it is still being studied and understood as to how to incorporate this in small as well as big-level applications/ programs. Hopefully, by the end of 2020, SCM memory will start rolling out for storage devices, computers, and data servers.
In the future, more new advancements and technology might be introduced on behalf of reduce the duplicate data that is accumulated on servers. Hence, with the above-given write-up, you must have known how data deduplication works and how you can manage duplicate data. If you have any other method or effective tool that helps in managing duplicate data, feel free to comment below.
