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.

ESXi backup to remote datastore by snapshots

This looks interesting as a free backup solution, once I get some time I shall be investigating this instead of our current backup of backing up the VM directly.

UPDATE:

This idea has been progressed further and looks like a better method is here:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-8760

Backing up ESXi at image level

This looks interesting as they are working on a ESXi version of their backup software. Also reasonably priced as well...

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