Question

What is the best free way to get your maintenance plan-generated backups compressed?

I know there are non-free tools that will compress the backups, but I’m not interested in them.

Options:

1. Have a T-SQL task after the backups that will run a script through xp_cmdshell that compresses every non compressed backup.
2. ???

Any other ideas welcome, I’d like to avoid writing a script/program.

Answer 1

I’m the author of an open source project (GPL v3) that might be what you are looking for (It’s not maintenance-plan based though). It is a command line tool (to schedule in Scheduled Tasks in Windows) and backs up to gzip, zip (specifically zip64 due to the 4GB limitation with regular zip files), or bzip2 files. You can use the tool to restore directly from the compressed files, or you can uncompress the compressed files (which are standard *.bak files) and use SQL Server to restore.

It’s called SQL Server Compressed Backup, found here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mssqlcompressed/

A sample command would be:

msbp.exe backup "db(database=model)" "zip64" "local(path=c:\model.full.bak.zip)"