Backup speed on SQLBackup 5

audun

Hi,

Running SQL Server 2005 SP2 on i Windows 2003 server.

I am in the process of evaluating SQLBackup 5.1.0.2781 and recently ran a full backup on a 315Gb database which did take the same time to run as an ordinary backup (about 2,5 hours).
The compression rate was good with almost 70%, but I had expected it to also run faster.

What are the possibilities to speed things up here?

Regards,
audun

Jason Cook

If you are not using the "multiple thread" or "multiple files" option when performing a backup, these can significantly increase the performance of your backups:

* If using a system with lots of processors, "multiple threads" will significantly improve CPU performance. The optimum value for most people will be something along the lines of the number of 2 x physical processors minus 1 (e.g. a 4 CPU box would have a threadcount of 7). With scripts this is the THREADCOUNT keyword.

* If you have lots of disks available for backing up to, you can spread the backup over multiple disks. This will speed up the disk I/O, which is usually the bottleneck with any backup process (native or SQL Backup). With scripts you can use multiple FILE keywords.

There is also an article in the SQL Backup help file that discusses theoretical maximum speeds... you can use this to assess what kind of speed you could achieve using the hardware available. An online version is available at:

http://help.red-gate.com/help/SQLBackup ... ackup.html

Hope that helps,
Jason