The difference between traditional compression and modern data deduplication is somewhat hazy. And it doesn’t help that various implementations fall all along the spectrum from “mildly interesting” to “cutting edge!”
The Storage Community
Data Reduction: the Condensed Version
Native Format Optimization (NFO) makes a lot of sense, since it addresses a common user error in a practical way, and allows capacity savings to “trickle-down†to backups, e-mail systems, and archives. But wholesale compression and the duplication of primary storage may not be worth much, especially since the cost of disk keeps dropping dramatically.