I'm re-evaluating Windows 2016/2019 deduplication engine, which is way better (faster/more capable) than what shipped in previous Windows versions. I understand how it works (sparsifying files via holes + reparse point + compression), the recommended use cases and the ones to avoid.
My use case will be the simper one - deduplicate a big share which is a good candidate to dedup (ie: ddpeval shows ~40% savings); however, I have some doubts about application compatibility:
Mac OS X clients (which are used by some) seems to have serious problems reading deduplication files, as you can see, for example, here, here and here
from Microsoft docs it seems that the
Expand-DedupFilecmdlet exists just for restoring files that have problems due to application compatibility.
These references let me think that deduplication is not really a "transparent" affair for the SMB client accessing the share, mainly because it seems to "export" (via SMB) the sparse nature of the files themselves. If the client has troubles managing sparse file, all sort of problem can happen.
So, my questions are:
are you using Windows deduplication for your production shares? If so, does any client show issues?
do you have any direct experience with Mac OS X clients?
short of excluding some shares from deduplication, what else I can do to avoid application compatibility issues?
apart for supporting dedup on ReFS volumes, does Windows 2019 change something else regarding deduplication?
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