Yep. At a previous job we had a file server that we published Windows build output to.
There were about 1000 copies of the same pre-requisite .NET and VC++ runtimes (each build had one) and we only paid for the cost of storing it once. It was great.
It is worth pointing out though, that on Windows Server this deduplication is a background process; When new duplicate files are created, they genuinely are duplicates and take up extra space, but once in a while the background process comes along and "reclaims" them, much like the Hyperspace app here does.
Because of this (the background sweep process is expensive), it doesn't run all the time and you have to tell it which directories to scan.
If you want "real" de-duplication, where a duplicate file will never get written in the first place, then you need something like ZFS
There were about 1000 copies of the same pre-requisite .NET and VC++ runtimes (each build had one) and we only paid for the cost of storing it once. It was great.
It is worth pointing out though, that on Windows Server this deduplication is a background process; When new duplicate files are created, they genuinely are duplicates and take up extra space, but once in a while the background process comes along and "reclaims" them, much like the Hyperspace app here does.
Because of this (the background sweep process is expensive), it doesn't run all the time and you have to tell it which directories to scan.
If you want "real" de-duplication, where a duplicate file will never get written in the first place, then you need something like ZFS