Unlike source deduplication, target deduplication occurs at the backup storage device level where incoming data is analyzed and deduplicated after transmission from the source but before being finally written to the storage medium.

This means that data is transferred in its entirety over the network before being optimized to eliminate redundancies, significantly reducing the storage space required for backups.

While this approach is particularly effective in environments where optimizing storage space is critical, it obviously requires more network bandwidth than source deduplication.