A system and method for calculating and storing block fingerprints for data dedu- plication. A fingerprint extraction layer generates a fingerprint of a predefined size, e.g., 64 bits, for each data block stored by a storage system. Each fingerprint is stored in a fingerprint record, and the fingerprint records are, in turn, stored in a fingerprint database for access by the data deduplication module. The data deduplication module may peri¬ odically compare the fingerprints to identify duplicate fingerprints, which, in turn, indi¬ cate duplicate data blocks.
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