Encryption with Compression

aarons44

Are the encryption and compression options mutually exclusive? I assume they are, since they always are in other software packages due to the nature of the two operations, but I wanted to confirm.

petey

You can perform both compression and encryption together in SQL Backup.

aarons44

That is excellent news!

aarons44

Is this true encryption of the entire file? I'm just a little skeptical, since Microsoft can't make encryption and compression work together in SQL Server 2008.

petey

The backup data is completely encrypted. The first 1024 bytes, which contains the SQL Backup header information, is partially encrypted.

I'm sure Microsoft is able to encrypt the entire file, but for reasons known only to them, they choose not to do so. They could have created compressed backups as far back as SQL Server 7, but again, they chose not to do so. This is because the backup SDK for third-party vendors was already available way back then.

aarons44

Thanks for the reply. Honestly, we were thinking about dropping RedGate when we moved to SQL 2008, because Microsoft is implementing compression and encryption finally, but they can't do both at the same time, which made me a little curious. Between the great support we get from RedGate, and the features of the product, we just renewed our licenses for another year.