Clay Lenhart's Blog » MSSQL Compressed Backup

SQL Server Compressed Backup v1.2 Released

Clay Lenhart — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:44:22 +0000

I’ve just released version 1.2-20091123 of SQL Server Compressed Backup which can be downloaded here.

SQL Server Compressed Backup will back up SQL Server databases using either gzip, zip or bzip2 compression.

The new features are:

Fixed the encoding problem by removing “\s”, “\p” and “\\” since they are commonly used in file paths and replacing them with “;;” to mean “;”. Looking at the command line options, it is only necessary to encode the semicolon, so “;;” is the only encoding the command line does.
Added a feature I’ve personally wanted: progress updates and an estimated time until completion. It is more verbose at the beginning (every few seconds), then slows down. After an hour of backing up, updates are only once every 24 minutes.
Worked on the BlockSize and BufferCount request. I’m not keen on implementing BlockSize. I’d like to hear someone explain how they take advantage of it. My understanding is that BlockSize is only for writing to devices (tapes and CD-ROMs — not files on a CD-ROM though), so it doesn’t seem appropriate for backing up to files. BufferCount and MaxTransferSize seem like reasonable options to request, so these are now available.

MSSQL Compressed Backup 1.0 Released

Clay Lenhart — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 21:40:10 +0000

I’ve just released version 1.0 of MSSQL Compressed Backup. This is a command line utility that allows you to backup or restore your SQL Server 2005 databases to/from compressed files such as zip, bzip2, or gzip.

http://mssqlcompressed.sourceforge.net/

SQL Server 2005 Compressed Backup

Clay Lenhart — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 12:21:22 +0000

I’ve been working on a way to backup SQL Server 2005 databases to a compressed file recently, but without using temporary files. I recently found that it is actually pretty easy. SQL Server has an interface for creating a virtual backup device so that the data is pumped to your application, not a real device. Once the application has the data, it can compress it, encrypt it, or do whatever it likes. Maybe DBAs would like to save the data to an FTP server. There are so many options.

The application I wrote is called MSQL Compressed Backup which you can find on Sourceforge. It is currently in beta, and I don’t plan to release a 1.0 version for awhile until it has had some testing by other people. If you are interested in it, please download a copy and give it a try.

Documentation is currently lacking, but here are a couple of examples. I think they are self explanatory.

msbp.exe backup [model] gzip file:///c:\model.bak.gz
msbp.exe restore file:///c:\model.bak.gz gzip [model]
Here, gzip knows to uncompress since it is in “restore” mode.
msbp.exe backup [model] bzip2(level=5) file:///c:\model.bak.bz2
Each plugin in the pipeline can have parameters.
msbp.exe backup [model] rate(ratemb=5.0) bzip2(level=5) file:///c:\model.bak.bz2
You can have any number of plugins in the pipeline. The rate plugin limits the impact of a backup on your server by restricting the speed of the backup (or restore).