US Patent 9152333 System and method for estimating storage savings from deduplication

Techniques for a method of estimating deduplication potential are disclosed herein. The method includes steps of selecting randomly a plurality of data blocks from a data set as a sample of the data set, collecting fingerprints of the plurality of data blocks of the sample, identifying duplicates of fingerprints of the sample from the fingerprints of the plurality of data blocks, estimating a total number of unique fingerprints of the data set depending on a total number of the duplicates of fingerprints of the sample based on a probability of fingerprints from the data set colliding in the sample, and determining a total number of duplicates of fingerprints of the data set depending on the total number of the unique fingerprints of the data set.