I am managing a SQL Server database around 1TB in size and facing challenges with long backup times and resource usage during full backups.
I am considering differential ; incremental backups and enabling compression.
Looking for advice on the best strategies to reduce backup time and resource impact while maintaining data integrity. I have checked SQL Server Administration - SQLTeam.com Forumssplunk guide but still need help.
Any tips ; recommendations on managing large database backups efficiently would be appreciated.
Backup compression is a must.
Differential backups are also very useful.
SQL Server does not inherently offer incremental backups.
Other things to consider:
(1) use (page) data compression in the table indexes themselves, to reduce the 1TB size.
(2) don't use nvarchar (rather than varchar) unless you genuinely need to (standard advice, but I've seen people use nvarchar(2) for U.S. state codes, which is just a waste of space)
If you have a lot of historic data, which does not change, you can also look at keeping the old data in read-only filegroups and doing filegroup backups. This makes restores a lot more complicated.
Be sure to increase the BUFFERCOUNT and MAXTRANSFERSIZE. Typically around 15-21 buffers is best. Set MAXSIZE to max size. (Note: SQL will allocate RAM equal to BC * MAXSIZE to support the settings.)