Exactly. The first upload is what takes all the time. Donna, I ask about the version, wondering if you have updated to v3. I use the Server Edition, which already has deduplication, but I don't think v1 and v2 of Workgroup Edition did. Jon makes reference to it, but it is much more efficient than that albeit somewhat complicated at the ground level.
v3 now deploys block-level de-duplication with compression which allows the data take up a very small space. De-duplication or Single Instance Store will only upload changed files, but more than that will only back up changed blocks within the file. So, if you have a PHI form that you save to your computer, only the block that contains the new data (say the patient demographics) will be backed up and will be pointed to the matching data. This pointer is then placed in an index. This will keep you from having any redundant data. If you backed up 50 emails with the same 50 email attachments, only one of the attachments would be backed up. This allows small backups and very fast. The de-duplication process can be either server side or cloud side, both with advantages and disadvantages.
Files such as .enc backups are backed up in entirety as it is not possible to back up blocks of a backup file (that I am aware of).
This would lead to my question to Jon as to why have 18 AC backup files. Having a year's worth of computer data makes sense as you can restore individual files and folders, but with the .enc backup, it is all or nothing. It would seem that anything over five .enc backups would have a lot of lost data from AC. Just an observation.
