How to Enable Data Deduplication in Windows 8

I'm running out of disk space in my test environment and how I am already using differencing disk to reduce the amount of space used. That triggered me to think of the deduplication feature to further "optimize" my disk space utilization.

But hold on, that feature is only available on the Windows 2012 server operating system. But thanks to a folk from "My Digital Life" forum I was able to get it to work on my Windows 8 client test computer. Basically what you need to do is copy the files needed for the data dedup feature from Windows Server 2012 to Windows 8. I've uploaded a copy to my SkyDrive so you can alternatively get it from there.

Once you've got it down to your local drive, open up powershell and change the path to where you copied the downloaded file to. Go ahead and run the below two commands. Yes, a reboot might be needed.

dism /online /add-package /packagepath:Microsoft-Windows-VdsInterop-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.2.9200.16384.cab /packagepath:Microsoft-Windows-VdsInterop-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~6.2.9200.16384.cab /packagepath:Microsoft-Windows-FileServer-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.2.9200.16384.cab /packagepath:Microsoft-Windows-FileServer-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~6.2.9200.16384.cab /packagepath:Microsoft-Windows-Dedup-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.2.9200.16384.cab /packagepath:Microsoft-Windows-Dedup-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~6.2.9200.16384.cab

dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:Dedup-Core /all

If all goes well, you'll see this from your control panel which is not available before this.

Now, because you're on Windows 8 and not on Windows Server 2012, you can't configure it using the Server manager. So your next best friend here is PowerShell. No biggy! Here's how you can configure Data Deduplication using PowerShell.

These are the few commands I used to get it working. This is to enable the feature on a particular volume.

PS C:\> Enable-DedupVolume D:

This is to start the optimization manually.

PS C:\> Start-DedupJob –Volume D: –Type Optimization

To look at the progress of the dedup job.

PS C:\> Get-DedupJob

By default, jobs have a pre-defined schedule. Use the Get-DedupSchedule to look at the schedule.

Here's what I had before dedup.

And here's what I'm getting after 15 minutes into the progress. Bear in mind it is still mid-way through the process. Not bad ey! Hope you enjoy it!