After reading the posts I listed, and seeing what was in 1.5.8, I know that most of the programs should be capable. I am wondering how to “enable” it. We have 226 images using 5.4TB on an XFS partition on the FOG server:

#df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% df -h
Mounted on
/dev/mapper/cl_fog2-images 28T 5.4T 22T 20% /images

I used rsync to make a copy of that to a CentOS 8 VDO volume with compression and deduplication enabled:

#vdostats --hu
Device Size Used Available Use% Space saving%
/dev/mapper/vdo1 6.0T 5.0T 1.0T 83% 2%
#df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vdo1 6.0T 5.2T 833G 87% /backup

Compression seems to have saved a small amount, but as most of the images are based on the the same “base” image, dedupe should have reduced it a great deal more. The images are compressed on the FOG server with default settings.

There are a couple of posts in the past couple years about deduplication, partclone 0.3.x, pigz vs gzip with the --rsyncable parameter to stop the rolling checksum.

See:
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/13206/the-future-of-partclone-and-therefore-fog-as-it-is
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/12750/file-format-and-compression-option-request

From these posts there seemed to be some success, but required versions of partclone, etc that were not yet in FOG.

Is it possible to configure recent FOG versions so that the images can be successfully deduplicated yet? If so, what needs to be configured to make it possible? I am running FOG 1.5.8.

@george1421 We have Dell 3050’s with the default settting on RAID-ON, as opposed to AHCI. We migrated from a FOG server running 1.4.2 to one running 1.4.4, and now the Dell computers show just a blinking cursor in the upper left corner just after selecting the Local Boot option from the FOG menu. Was there a change between the 2 versions that affect this? The Dell computers were working in RAID-ON mode while booting to the 1.4.2 server.