Currently we use a SQL maintenance plan to do a full backup of all our databases daily (about 40 databases on our production server). As you can imagine, this eats up disk space quickly so currently we manually zip the backup files and/or move them to an archive drive. I considered writing an application to walk through the backup folder structure and zip any .bak file it finds, but I know there are some third party tools out there that will backup/restore a MS SQL database.
I was wondering if any of these also zip the backups once they are created. Any recommendations or suggestions are welcome.
First of all, for the sake of your business and clients, I would keep an agreed-upon set of backups in the original state. While it hasn't happened to me often, I have had the problem of a corrupted zip file before. Anything that compresses data has the possibility for corruption. I would recommend at least a week (7 days) worth of backups; at least that's what I would want.
As for a quick, easy, and free way to compress files (using XP or higher), just send the backup files to a compressed folder. Create a new folder, right-click it, choose 'Properties, Click 'Advanced' under the General tab, and choose 'Compress contents to save disk space'. If you hover your mouse over the folder, it gives you the space the folder would take up if uncompressed; if you right-click the folder again and choose 'Properties', you'll see the original size of all the filesand the actual size of all the files on the disk. You can also do this with individual files by viewing properties.
Note: compressed files show in blue.
By compressing a folder, any new file created in it will be compressed automatically. However, if you simply 'Move' an existing file, the file will retain its current state (if it wasn't compressed to begin with, it won't compress).
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