Backup Speed

AvatarJeremy Frog asked 5 years ago

If I have enough DASD to backup uncompressed, will the back up be faster, slower, or the same if I don’t compress?

1 Answers
Marcel BrownMarcel Brown Staff answered 5 years ago

Wow! DASD is not a very common term for a drive! Anyway, the answer depends on the type of data and your hardware. With hard drives, most computers can compress data faster than they can transfer it to the drive. So compression will actually speed up something like a backup. But at the highest levels of compression, it is possible that the compression process will be longer than the transferring. So there is a point where higher levels of compression will lose you time. And with solid state drive and faster data transfer speeds, this point will be reached with lesser levels of compression. So depending on the software you have to backup with, it may state estimated times depending on the compression level. Ultimately, however, you may need to test to find out for sure. Please let us know the details of your back and what you find out!