<p>Has anyone found a good compression format for MS Sqlserver databases? If so, what do you use and are you pleased with how it performs? </p>

<p>My company frequently will compress a database snapshot from one of our clients and download it so we have a local copy for testing and dev purposes. We tried zip in the past, but once the database files crossed the 4Gb boundary we had to use rar (zip is 32-bit only). The problem is rar takes a lot of time to compress, and we don't know if it gives us the best compression ratio either.</p>

<p>This isn't a question about the compression utility so much as the compression format. We use WinRar, but are considering 7zip, which supports a number of formats.</p>

[{'answer_id': 23389, 'author': 'SQLMenace', 'author_id': 740, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/740', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>In sql 2008 you have native compression, if you have to do this a lot and don\'t have SQL server 2008 then take a look at something like <a href="http://www.quest.com/litespeed-for-sql-server/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Quest LiteSpeed</a> which compreeses the backup automatically</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 26428, 'author': 'dlamblin', 'author_id': 459, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/459', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>In the no-cost category, newer versions of <a href="http://www.gzip.org/#faq10" rel="nofollow noreferrer">gzip</a> and <a href="http://www.bzip.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">bzip2</a> are supposed to include large file support (someone on the internet tells me that bzip2 1.0.1 and beyond is large file compatible thanks to Cyril Pilsko, while gzip 1.2 can be patched which the dowloadable binaries are, and the gzip 1.3 beta includes support). While I use 7zip on my windows pc for convenience, I tend to prefer bzip2 for speed vs compression.</p>\n\n<p>I have also heard of tricking the non-large-file versions by doing something like <code>cat file | gzip &gt; file.gz</code>.  Generally you\'re trading off time with compression level, but one of bzip2\'s claims is that it uncompresses very quickly, which in a disaster recovery situation should be your most important metric.  In that regard, I believe EMC\'s tape backup solution (ELM?) used to skip compression on DB partitions by default. Also If you\'re really serious about packing it into a tiny space, you might try something like <a href="http://rzip.samba.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">rzip</a>, but I\'ve never known anyone to actually use it.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 185193, 'author': 'Robert K', 'author_id': 24950, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/24950', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>There\'s always <a href="http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/ucl/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">UCL compression</a> and or <a href="http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/lzo/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">LZO compression</a>, both are GPLed so be sure you know how you\'re using them if it is a commercial project.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 73290927, 'author': 'MrCalvin', 'author_id': 3175384, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/3175384', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>I\'ve tried most compression algorithm for SQL bak compression and the clear winner is the old and all forgotten freearc!<br>\nIt\'s speed/compression ratio is the best I\'ve seen. It even adds recovery blocks to the archive, so if it gets corrupted  (e.g. bytes got lost) it can self-recover.<br>\nVersion 0.67 can be retrieved from the peazip package (<a href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/peazip/files/8.7.0/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">sourceforge.net</a>)<br>\nDownload the package <code>peazip_portable-8.7.0.WIN64.zip</code> and extract to grab the freearc compression tool.</p>\n<p>Command example: <code>Arc.exe create -m3 --recovery &quot;c:\\temp\\SQL.bak.arc&quot; &quot;c:\\temp\\SQL.bak&quot;</code></p>\n<p>Example SQL bak file <strong>444MB</strong>:<br>\narc, level 3: archive size: <strong>48MB</strong>, time <strong>0:38</strong> min (even with recovery blocks!)<br>\n7z, level normel: arvhice size: <strong>57MB</strong>, time <strong>1:54</strong> min<br>\n(both 4 threads)</p>\n<p>It\'s a sad thing it kind of disappeared from the world and no one took over the project. But I think it was just to feature rich, the project was simple to comprehensive.<br>\nLet me know if you need more links and source...I\'ve tried to collect as much as possible, some has disappeared from the web since :-(</p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/23376', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/2188/']