I am trying to figure out how SQL Server DBAs are doing their backups and verify in 2005. I use the Idera's free stored procs (which is no longer available to download btw) to backup and verify and have gotten around 65% compression. If there any other free alternative?
Thanks in advance,
-Subhash
Free (good) SQL Server DBA tools are hard to find. = /
Have you considered Windows Backups?
It's definitely not the best thing out there, and it takes up a lot of space, but it is free, it does backup your data, and you already have it installed.
Not sure if this is what Idera's scripts do, but you could script a (native) SQL backup to a temporary location, then call PKZip or 7zip or some command-line compression software to compress the backup to a permanent storage location.
Note that most of these zip utilities have a high CPU cost.
See the discussion in the comments of this post: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/02/our-backup-strategy-inexpensive-nas/
(Edit: Or just upgrade to SQL2008 R2, which supports native backup compression.)