A company is implementing a disk-based backup strategy that requires maximum efficiency of the backup storage. Which technology provides this capability?

Clustering combines multiple servers to provide high availability or load balancing, not to improve storage efficiency of backup data.

Data deduplication is a process that identifies and eliminates redundant copies of data blocks, storing only a single unique instance of each block. This significantly reduces the amount of physical storage required for backups, thus maximizing storage efficiency by storing more logical data in less physical space.

Cloning creates an exact copy of data, which increases storage consumption rather than improving efficiency by reducing redundancy.

Replication creates and maintains copies of data in different locations for disaster recovery or high availability, which inherently consumes more storage.