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Compressing large windows backup files

rsutton

I have several Windows backup images (100-250GB each) that I upload for DR every week. Does anyone know of software that is good at compressing large backup files? I need to be able to script & schedule it too.

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Comments

Hyper-Me

Windows Backup itself? on 2008?

I think they are already fairly compressed.

rsutton

Hyper-Me wrote: »

Windows Backup itself? on 2008?

I think they are already fairly compressed.

Yep, I'm using the built in Windows 2008 backup. Was afraid of that.

pennystrader

I am not sure what would be a good tool for this but had bookmarked this article about a year ago at a previous job when this came up but this article was interesting in several aspects.

Maximum Compression (lossless data compression software)

UnixGeek

Is the primary motivation for compression to save disk space, or conserve network bandwidth? Windows isn't my strong point, but if you were using rsync or its equivalents to transfer just the deltas, then you'd actually be better off transfering an uncompressed backup over the wire, and applying any compression at the destination.

When confronted with Windows, I heavily abuse Cygwin.

tiersten

We installed some Riverbed boxes to handle this and other WAN optimisation.

rsutton

I have a 7 MBps uplink so I'm trying to minimize time I'm transferring data across the wire. Not sure their is room in the budget for new equipment but I will check out the Riverbed boxes.

astorrs

Like UnixGeek suggested, find a way to do it using deltas (incrementals) nothing will give you a better reduction in data than that. You can always use synthetic backups so you only have a single full backup to restore from at the DR site.

WAN optimization (like Riverbed) is great, but in addition not as a replacement for reasonably sized backups.

rsutton

Incrementals would be nice but Windows Server 2008 does not give you that option when backing up to a network share.

UnixGeek

rsutton wrote: »

Incrementals would be nice but Windows Server 2008 does not give you that option when backing up to a network share.

Is throwing rsync at the problem an option? It'll run under cygwin.