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user1034912
Asked: 2012-02-09 17:34:13 +0800 CST

Is it a good idea to compress a MS SQL database backup?

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Quick question! I heard that we should never shrink our databases. However, does the same rules apply to compressing our SQL backup?

Thanks

backup sql compression shrink

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Backup files are just "data at rest". There's no harm in compressing them. To restore them you'll need to decompress them.

    You'll be using some CPU to perform the compression. You might want to compress them on a machine other than the SQL Server computer itself if you're concerned about using its CPU.

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  2. Heck yes! Compress away! Best of all possible worlds is to use something like lightspeed or sql 2008 r2 compressed backups to compress.

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