Thanks for the stats on ZIPped MS-SQL db files - that has saved me doing
some tests!

I will eventually have to backup MS_SQL servers on 31 sites to a number of
remote locations and so I am currently experimenting with a number of
strategies.

At the moment, I am backing up as follows:

1) A nightly scheduled batch file runs SQL scripts to dump the tables by
calling a stored procedure

    Backups are called backup_tablename_dayofweek.bak (eg:
backup_testdb_wed.bak)

2) The .bak file is renamed to backup_tablename.bak to create a daily
generic backup file which is synced off-site by BackupPC

3) The .bak file is ZIPped to !B_tablename_dayofweek.zip (eg:
!B_testdb_Wed.zip) and this is left in the backup folder as a local copy.
BackupPC is set to ignore files that start !B* so these files are not copied
offsite but are kept for a week until overwritten.

It's not easy to determine actual backup speed and performance yet because
we have only rolled out the new app on two sites, and the devs are messing
around with the database schema so a lot of the data in the .bak file is
changing between backups. During initial testing (when things were not being
changed so much), a daily sync of a 700MB database was taking around 20-40
minutes, albeit across an old 512K ADSL (VPN) line with an upload speed of
288Kbit/sec. I have just upgraded this to an LLU service that's currently
running at 5.5Mbit down, 883Kbit up and will be seeing what improvement this
gives.

Our 700MB .bak files ZIP down to around 130MB and I was wondering whether it
would be worth taking this offsite, but it may be that syncing the raw dumps
may be quicker.

Nigel




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