Help SQL Server Help You; by making your Backups Smaller and Faster?

Ok so I don’t think anyone will complain when I say there are ways to make your backups faster, or even smaller. But I assume that most people that work with SQL Server will right off the bat start thinking about products that compress your backups such as Litespeed for SQL Server, or RedGates Hyperbac to just name a couple of many. These tools will do the job, there is an ROI to using them and in my opinion databases that are Medium to Large should use something like this, even if your disk is a plenty. Then again, there are those groups of us that will stand up and say, heck if I want a smaller backup or a faster backup I will just use the compression in SQL Server Enterprise Edition.

BUT….

What do you do if you are not getting the backups small enough? What if you need to compress it even more? Is there other ways that you can stream line out of your backups, or are compression tools it? The good news is there is even more room that you can reclaim out of your backups. Now here is the spoiler…

This is going to require some work on your side, and the chapter about Efficient backups by Greg Linwood is going to help you get there. There is some stuff in your databases that you may not even need to backup, now the question is how do you get it so that your backups know not to back up all this unneeded data? Well again I am going to refer you back to Chapter 33. I can tell you that here is yet another reason that I don’t think we have enough sessions on how you simply create a database. My next session that I am going to submit to PASS is going to be on this topic. The information that Greg is sharing with you in this chapter is what separates the good DBA’s from the Great DBA’s. It’s not the attribute of how to get more space out of your backups, but the attribute of know how to get the most of your configuration, and creating a configuration that you can get the most out of.

Enjoy the Chapter.