If a database that should be backed up via SqlBak is not particularly large, then there is no need to set compression options in a specific way. It is recommended to use the default values.
The features below are designed to fine-tune compression for highly loaded systems and large databases.
If you specify a password in the “Encrypt compressed files” section, then the backup files will be encrypted.
This guide contains recommendations for setting up a SqlBak backup job. This information has been developed and collected over years of interaction with SqlBak users. There will be no theory and formulas, only practical advice.
Note that these practices are not the only solutions. They are suitable in most cases, but can be fundamentally wrong under various circumstances.
Let’s consider the steps that are used to set up a backup job.
In one database management system, there can be multiple databases. When creating a backup job, you can choose which databases specifically need to be backed up. The backup of each database will be made independently from the other databases and placed in a separate archive.
For large data volumes, backup job execution can take a lot of time. However, there are several tricks that can help optimize the time.
SQL Server backup is a page-by-page physical copy of the database files. And, generally, the size of a backup is about the size of the database. However, there are several ways to cut the backup size substantially.
Reducing the backup size has the following benefits:
Starting from SqlBak app version 3.2.9, you can export a job to a JSON file and then import it using the SqlBak.Job.Cli.exe utility. This functionality is needed primarily for automated deployment of the SqlBak application and backup jobs creation. A simple tutorial on how to do this is described in the following blog post: How to deploy SqlBak app automatically.
The sqlbak.job.cli.exe utility is a programming interface for working with the SqlBak application. It is located in the root directory where the application is installed.
This tool can be used to register the application, manage connections to DBMS, and import jobs from JSON configurations.
When SqlBak is installed on a large number of servers, the deployment can be automated in 3 steps:
Storing backups only on a local disk is not a good practice, because you risk losing them if the disk becomes corrupted. It is recommended, therefore, that you send backups to multiple destinations to always be able to restore your databases. In this blog post, we will show how to create regular SQL Server backups and automatically send some of them to a local folder and some to the cloud (Azure Storage, for example) via SqlBak.