US Patent 11314705 Opportunistic partial deduplication

A technique for managing deduplication performs partial-block matching opportunistically by leveraging information acquired during times when a storage system has available resources. The information identifies anchor blocks that are likely targets for partial-block matches, based on discovering that the anchor blocks belong to populations of blocks that have high similarity. When processing write requests, inline activities access anchor blocks that closely match newly arriving candidate blocks and perform partial-block deduplication against those anchor blocks.