Post Published on April 3, 2010.
Last Updated on July 12, 2021 by davemackey.
Redgate SQL Backup is an amazing product I’ve been using for years and must highly recommend to anyone who is responsible for MSSQL servers. Plus, its fun talking to those Brits – they have a funny English accent and all. 😉
Here’s why I like Redgate so much (and no, I’m not getting paid to say this…):
- Price – You can get the lite version for $295 or the pro version for $795. Yeah, that $795 is a bit hefty, but what I generally recommend is getting the Pro for your main DB server and then the lite’s for all those other DB’s floating around the network (yeah, I know, the ones you wish didn’t exist).
- Size – Redgate turns ten and twenty GB database files into 1 and 2 GB files – its really quite amazing. This saves me a lot of frustration. One can easily keep 30 or 60 days of full backups without consuming storage that might otherwise be consumed in just a few days.
- Ease of Use – Redgate’s app. isn’t the most beautiful you will ever discover (though it has progressed leaps and bounds) but it is extremely intuitive to use. Its a set it and forget it sort of application (other than those email notifications you better setup through Redgate to let you know when a job fails!).
- Object Level Recovery – This is a relatively new feature and only available in the Pro version – but a huge time saver. No longer must you restore backups as a full database and then pull data across from one to the other – now you can restore individual tables directly into your live database (or, as I prefer, into a separate table which I can then compare with the live data).
Here is what I’d like to see from Redgate that isn’t quite there yet:
- Reporting – I’d like a nice, GUI based reporting. I asked for this feature a while back and was told it was on the developers to-do…but not sure how far out, since I’m fairly certain a major release has been made since then.
- Price – The Pro version is a bit pricey. I’d like to see the Pro come down in price or include a few “agents” (Lite) in the price which can be used on other db servers.
- Integration – This is just a throw it out there, but I’m also a big fan of Spiceworks – so I’d love to see a dashboard widget. 😉