How to enable Windows 8 Deduplication (Hack / Guide)

Windows 8 doesn't support (natively) deduplication, but we can import the binaries from Server 2012 and run them on windows 8 for some lovely disk space saving. This clearly isn't supported, nor is it guaranteed to work but it's worked everywhere I've run it. There's no GUI option, it's all in PowerShell but it's dead simple.

What is deduplication? "It is a specialized data compression technique for eliminating duplicate copies of repeating data" according to Wikipedia.

I run this to save space on things like Battlefield 3. It's also great for version control where only small ports of a file change but largely it remains similar. I have a games storage space of multiple SSD which BF3 is run from, between using storage spaces and dedupe I have speed and capacity.

The Guide:

Download (http://sdrv.ms/Xu7JrY), extract and copy the dedupe files to c:\dedupefiles\

Open powershell as an Administrator and change directory to c:\dedupefiles

Run the following command in an elevated powershell window:
Now run this command to enable the feature:
Then, enable dedupe on your chosen volume. Here, I am enabling this on my d:\ drive. It will not work on a boot volume.
Dedupe will only work on files of a certain age, to reduce this to dedupe files as quickly as possible but this is not recommended to avoid needless disk thrashing.
Now lets run the first optimsation run on volume d:
To see the how far the job has progressed (do not expect this to be quick, espically on the first run). You will need to rerun this several times to view the progress. If this command returns no results, the job is complete!
Once this has complete, we can see how much space has been saved with the following command.
Deduplication is not an inline process, meaning tasks are run. These tasks can be viewed in task scheduler, but it's just as easy in powershell.
Optmisation will run in the background; there is also a couple of other tasks which run. Garbage collection and Scrubbing.
There's a bit more you can do, but now you should have a volume with some space saved!
Microsoft website is filled with commands: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831434.aspx
This is a very CPU intensive and Disk I/O bound; you're best running this initally when not wanting to do some heavy gaming!

Images to help:

















The same windows XP iso copied multiple times to give a good dedupe ratio for example.













Task Scheduler view of the dedupe jobs



cpu usage



Heavy reads



More space saved



I didn't come up with this, there's a few guides online but they're not overly clear. Hopefully this makes it easier...