We recently upgraded our enterprise file servers to Windows 2012 mainly for the built-in deduplication. It has brought significant savings, some volumes are down by 40% or more. We're talking 10+ TB's so far since Saturday's upgrade. We use Networker 8 on the client, 7.6.4 on the server, and Data Domain for the media.

Here is an example of a folder that was optimized.

Original size 403MB

Dedupe size 31MB

Backup size on DD 23MB

Now, the real point of the post. I was concerned with restoring the data. We did two restores, one to a normal volume and one to another location on the same deduplicated volume.

On the 1st, it restored the data fully in its original, non-optimized size of 403MB.

On the 2nd, it restored the data fully, but in the optimized state at 31MB.

We are testing with larger pieces of data to try to load test the system, but everything looks good so far.

Just wanted to share the experience.