Unitrends systems are designed to use all available storage for protecting data (see Storage allocation and distribution). As scheduled or immediate backups are performed, or as backups are replicated to a target system, the oldest backups are deleted to ingest new backups. See About retention control for details.
To increase retention, Unitrends systems utilize adaptive deduplication to remove duplicate data blocks from backups. With deduplication, backup sizes decrease as duplicate blocks are removed, thereby increasing the number of backups that can be stored on the system, also referred to as on-system retention.
Native deduplication is enabled by default. An outside deduplication device can be used for Unitrends Enterprise Backup, but physical systems must use native deduplication. If you use an outside deduplication device, you can disable native deduplication for backups stored on this device when you add it to the system. For details, see Configuring storage.
Use the following procedures to balance system performance versus retention to suit your environment.