In backup storage, delta compression successfully achieves a much higher data reduction ratio than chunk-level deduplication by applying a finer granularity in redundancy detection and elimination. However, it introduces additional, intensive computation overhead and results in a 50%–70% worsening backup throughput.

The rapid growth of container images leads to heavy storage pressures on image registries. Fine-grained deduplication, such as at the file and chunk levels, is a promising technique for reducing the storage space in image registries, compared to Docker's native coarse-grained image layer deduplication. However, fine-grained deduplication often incurs significant image restoration latency due to fragmented I/Os, resulting in up to 8× restoration I/O slowdowns. Moreover, existing restore-optimized deduplication techniques are not tailored to the characteristics of the container image, resulting in low deduplication ratios of images. Consequently, restoring performance remains a critical barrier to the practical adoption of fine-grained deduplication in container image registries. To address this challenge, we propose MiDedup, a restore-friendly fine-grained deduplication approach tailored for container image registries. MiDedup is built on an underexplored observation: the redundancy across layers of images follows a non-uniform distribution. Based on this insight, MiDedup introduces three core techniques: ① Across-layer-aware reorganization, which reorganizes deduplicated data into a compact, sequential layout, significantly reduces fragmented I/Os during image restore. ② Popularity-aware rewriting, which selectively rewrites hot image layers to further improve the balance between deduplication ratio and restore performance. ③ Hybrid-granularity deduplication, which combines file-level and chunk-level deduplication to reduce metadata and fragmented data. Experiments on the real-world Docker image dataset show that MiDedup reduces the 50–80% restore I/O overhead of fine-grained deduplication, which is comparable to the restore performance of native layer-level deduplication, while achieving 1.2–7.3× higher deduplication ratios.