Speed Up And Compress Backups – For Free

There are many different third party tools available for Microsoft SQL Server to provide encrypted, compressed and quicker backups – all of which have their own costs and licensing. Idera Software however, provide a freeware version of their backup tool – SQLSafe, cleverly named “SQLSafe Freeware Edition”. While this version of the tool has nowhere near the same amount of features and functionality of it’s paid for counterpart, however if your after a way to speed up and compress your backups without parting with any cash, then the Freeware version is for you.

Once you have installed the software (the process is very self explanitory) it adds four extended stored procedures to the Master database.

xp_ss_backup
xp_ss_restore
xp_ss_list
xp_ss_verify

The purpose of each one should be self explanatory, and once installed you also have access to some sample scripts so you can see how it all works. 

While running backups, the SQLSafe process obviously uses resource on the server, the most noticeable of whcih is the CPU. The highest I have seen is 25%.

I will be posting some example scrips showing how to do various types of backups and restores using this excellent free tool.

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• SQL Backups
• SQLSafe