This is an old thread but I just thought I would post my comment:

I just had a discussion with our SAN Admin and I told him that my team leader won't listen to me anyway but we are probably wasting space backing a SQL backup directly through Avamar. We have a 150 GB database and through native compression it gets down to 33 GB if we do it locally. SAN Admin mentioned that he "doesn't worry" about space because of the dedup functionality - so according to him Avamar backups a 150 GB file but then after, the dedup tool come into picture and it shrinks the file by comparing it to the previous day backup file. :w00t:

Restore scenario - From SQL, if we take a differential backup, it won't be of any use if the full backup is lost. In Avamar, it doesn't save the whole file every time, but when you try to restore, it "somehow" know of the "FULL" (the first file) even though through the dedup it only stores the "differential" changes. How does this actually work?

I appreciate your response.