Turn off dedup and delete chunkstore?

Question

I cannot find any guides on how to completely disable deduplucation and delete all traces of the chunkstore. I was trying to use dedup on a volume, but it turns out that it's less efficient than using non-dedup because the files are too large on that volume. So now I want to disable dedup and use basic file storage.

I made all dedup folders exceptions and ran powershell garbagecollection per this thread, but I can't get it to 0% - I still have over 250gb remaining in the system volume information\dedup\chunkstore folder. https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/d48f27cd-f932-43af-a854-3552b09c9252/best-practice-disable-or-remove-deduplication-on-a-volume

Answer 1

Hello there,

The Disable-DedupVolume cmdlet disables further data deduplication activity on one or more volumes. After you disable data deduplication, the volume remains in a deduplicated state and the existing deduplicated data is accessible. The server stops running data deduplication jobs for the volume and new data is not deduplicated. To undo data deduplication on a volume, use the Start-DedupJob cmdlet and specify Unoptimization for the Type parameter.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/deduplication/disable-dedupvolume?view=windowsserver2022-ps

Open an elevated Command Prompt or PowerShell window.

Run the following command to disable deduplication on the volume:

Disable-DedupVolume -Volume <DriveLetter> -Type UnOptimized

Hope this resolves your Query !!

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Answer 2

Found the needle in the haystack: https://www.mark-gilbert.co.uk/server-2012-and-2012-r2-deduplication-removal/

 

In powershell, I had to do was run this command:

start-dedupjob -Volume s: Unoptimization

 

Then I uninstalled dedup in Roles & Features, and rebooted server.