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Boosting the Restoring Performance of Deduplication Data by Classifying Backup Metadata

Restoring data is the main purpose of data backup in storage systems. The fragmentation issue, caused by physically scattering logically continuous data across a variety of disk locations, poses a negative impact on the restoring performance of a deduplication system. Rewriting algorithms are used to alleviate the fragmentation problem by improving the restoring speed of a deduplication system. However, rewriting methods give birth to a big sacrifice in terms of deduplication ratio, leading to a huge storage space waste. Furthermore, traditional backup approaches treat file metadata and chunk metadata as the same, which causes frequent on-disk metadata accesses. In this article, we start by analyzing storage characteristics of backup metadata. An intriguing finding shows that with 10 million files, the file metadata merely takes up approximately 340 MB. Motivated by this finding, we propose a Classified-Metadata based Restoring method (CMR) that classifies backup metadata into file metadata and chunk metadata. Because the file metadata merely takes up a meager amount of space, CMR maintains all file metadata in memory, whereas chunk metadata are aggressively prefetched to memory in a greedy manner. A deduplication system with CMR in place exhibits three salient features: (i) It avoids rewriting algorithms’ additional overhead by reducing the number of disk reads in a restoring process, (ii) it increases the restoring throughput without sacrificing the deduplication ratio, and (iii) it thoroughly leverages the hardware resources to boost the restoring performance. To quantitatively evaluate the performance of CMR, we compare our CMR against two state-of-the-art approaches, namely, a history-aware rewriting method (HAR) and a context-based rewriting scheme (CAP). The experimental results show that compared to HAR and CAP, CMR reduces the restoring time by 27.2% and 29.3%, respectively. Moreover, the deduplication ratio is improved by 1.91% and 4.36%, respectively.