Welcome to the blog of mechanised.com

This blog is mainly a technical repository of information on Virtualisation tools and management for our hosting service.

Also for HP's Bladesystem that we use at both our datacentres.

Other articles are also included on .Net development and MS SQL Server as well as other interesting things we come across.

Sunday 21 September 2008

Interesting binary diff tool, would help enormously for our daily backup's to SAN

Need to investigate tools such as these to save space on offsite daily backups especially databases.

Do a monthly full on first of each month then daily backups are diffed against the original. At any point a previous day backup can be regenerated from the 2 files.

I'll have to do some testing on the many terrabytes of storage to see just how much we could save! In theory savings of at least 50% size could be possible, especially with large mainly static databases and site files.

UPDATE:

Tried this and found that especially databases are never exactly the same data in the same place so it doesn't quite work out, also takes a very long time and so not really usable for daily backups.

This is not really as critical as SQL Server 2005 now has differential backup and site files are backed up with a full monthly and then incremental daily changes. This is keeping our backup sizes down small enough to not run out of space on our backup NAS drives.

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