Various object de-duplication techniques may be applied to object systems (such as to files in a file store) to identify similar or identical objects or portions thereof, so that duplicate objects or object portions may be associated with one copy, and the duplicate copies may be removed. However, an object de-duplication technique that is suitable for de-duplicating one type of object may be inefficient for de-duplicating another type of object; e.g., a de-duplication method that significantly condenses sets of small objects may achieve very little condensation among sets of large objects, and vice versa. A multimodal approach to object de-duplication may be devised that analyzes an object to be stored and chooses a de-duplication technique that is likely to be effective for storing the object. The object index may be configured to support several de-duplication schemes for indexing and storing many types of objects in a space-economizing manner.
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