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Manage automatic volume-level background deduplication on AFF systems

Contributors

Beginning with ONTAP 9.3, volume-level background deduplication can be managed to run automatically using a predefined auto AFF policy. No manual configuration of the schedules is required. The auto policy performs continuous deduplication in the background.

The auto policy is set for all newly created volumes and for all upgraded volumes that have not been manually configured for background deduplication. You can change the policy to default or any other policy to disable the feature.

If a volume moves from a non-AFF system to an AFF system, the auto policy is enabled on the destination node by default. If a volume moves from an AFF node to a non-AFF node, the auto policy on the destination node is replaced by the inline-only policy by default.

On AFF, the system monitors all the volumes having the auto policy and deprioritizes the volume that has less savings or has frequent overwrites. The deprioritized volumes no longer participate in automatic background deduplication. Change logging on deprioritized volumes is disabled and metadata on the volume is truncated.

Users can promote the deprioritized volume to re-participate in an automatic background deduplication using the volume efficiency promote command available at the advanced privilege level.