A systems administrator notices the host filesystem is running out of storage space. Which of the following will best reduce the storage space on the system?

Deduplication scans the filesystem for identical data blocks and replaces duplicates with pointers to a single shared copy, reducing the total physical space consumed. Unlike compression, it targets redundancy across files and datasets rather than encoding efficiency within a single file. This makes it the most effective option for reclaiming storage on a host filesystem that is nearing capacity.

Compression reduces the encoded size of individual files but does not eliminate duplicate data blocks across the filesystem, so its space savings are typically lower than deduplication in environments with repetitive data.

Adaptive optimization automatically moves data between storage tiers based on access frequency to improve performance, not to reduce total storage consumption.

Thin provisioning allocates disk space to volumes on demand rather than upfront, which avoids wasting pre-allocated space but does not reduce space already consumed by existing data.