Hi there,
I would like to ask for advice on what to choose for Urbackup server.
Situation:
no image backup, only file backup
Linux and Windows clients
around 10 clients
Questions:
Is Windows Server 2016 or 2019 necessary or will Windows 10 Pro work for the use case, too?
Will I gain a significant amount of disk space with utilizing Windows Server data deduplication compared to Windows standard NTFS compression and deduplication in Urbackup?
Thanks in advance for sharing you experience on this.
Win 10 Pro should work, though preventing it “randomly” rebooting for updates at inconvenient times is a PITA, but doable given the right group policy entries / registry edits. You’d obviously lose the possibility of Server deduplication.
My use case is slightly different, about a dozen clients, a mix of Win 7, 10, & 2012r2 with the server on 2012r2.
Since I do use image backups, & don’t know what your backed up data will be like in terms of deduplication I can’t say what you might or might not save using Server deduplication, you’d really need to run the evaluation tool against the actual backed up data to get a real idea. In my case said tool underestimated actual savings.
With either I’d recommend formatting the storage using large file records as outlined in the administration manual for windows Vista, the same issues can occur using NTFS compression or Server deduplication on large files.
Both NTFS compression and Server Deduplication can be used concurrently with some caveats, System Volume Information must not be compressed if Server deduplication is enabled otherwise corruption will result, & you need to avoid compressing the folders for clients with huge files (typically large image backups) so as not to exceed the file size NTFS compression can handle.
In my own case I’m seeing a rather remarkable 63% deduplication rate, probably because of the images of similarly configured machines.
Given the wider choice of file systems for the storage & some other potential gains they offer, others may well advise considering Linux for your server.
I’m on Win 10 Pro [1909], Intel i5 5th gen, 24GB RAM, RAID5 12TB in total for backups + 120GB SSD for Windows OS. Virgin broadband 320Mbs/20Mbs down/up and 41 clients incl. Hyper-V hosts and image backups over the Internet + 1 local. It works.
No to built-in compression. Problems with images. File deduplication on Win server 2019 worked saving bit less than 20% but getting another 4TB HDD was cheaper that Win Server license.