Patent ID: 8825617

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving, by a processor, data for deduplication, wherein a deduplication ratio is a factor by which storage requirements of the received data are to be reduced and a data deduplication threshold is a selected amount of the received data that is deduplicated to determine whether the deduplication ratio is achievable for the received data, and wherein the deduplication ratio is set such that an attempt is made to reduce storage requirements of the data by at least a factor of 20; determining whether the received data the received data has been quiescent at least for a period of time indicated in a data quiescence measure, wherein the period of time indicated in the data quiescence measure is at least a plurality of days; in response to determining that the received data has been quiescent for at least the period of time indicated in the data quiescence measure, performing: deduplicating the selected amount of the received data to generate an amount of deduplicated data; determining whether the generated amount of deduplicated data exceeds the data deduplication threshold, wherein the data duplication threshold is set to be at least 100 gigabytes; in response to determining that the generated amount of deduplicated data exceeds the data deduplication threshold, determining whether the generated amount of deduplicated data has achieved the deduplication ratio; and in response to determining that the generated amount of deduplicated data has not achieved the deduplication ratio, discontinuing the deduplicating of the received data and switching to a different set of data for deduplication; and in response to determining that the received data has not been quiescent for at least the period of time indicated in the data quiescence measure, receiving additional data for deduplication, and wherein deduplication of the data is abandoned when user specified deduplication parameters including the deduplication ratio, the data quiescence measure, and the data duplication threshold are not satisfied.