Alternatives to Network Backup

There are ways to tune backups by messing with different knobs like MAXTRANSFERSIZE or BUFFERCOUNT, or striping the file (which you've noted you're already doing).

The problem is that touching those knobs may still result in hitting the limits of your network and/or storage, and them not having any real impact on backup time.

Your first job should be to benchmark the storage you're backup up to using Crystal Disk Mark or DiskSpd. That'll give you some idea of how fast you can expect writes to be at their best.

The next thing you need to test is reads from the drives you're backing up from. If you run a backup to NUL, you can time how long it takes just the read portion of your backup, without having to write it to disk.

With both those numbers in mind, you can start messing with other knobs to see which ones get you closest to them, regardless of if your backup target is local or networked.

The alternative you mentioned seems to be the best choice.

What you can do is a 2 step process :

• Take native sql server backups with compression using Ola's backup solution locally.
• Use Robocopy to do the transfers to a network share. This is decoupled and can run as a Windows scheduled task.

This way, your backups are local and they will be fast. You will need more disk space and obviously redundancy (what if the backup disk fails - you don't want to lose all your backups).

Alternatively, as recommended by Max Vernon, do the Robocopy as a step in the backup job to ensure the robocopy only occurs if the backup is successfully completed, and as soon as possible after the backup is complete. The backup is at the same risk as the data, as long as it stays local.

Also, regularly test your restores since if you cannot restore a backup - what purpose does it serve!

Also, refer to my answer to SQL Backup tuning large databases

A couple of potential solutions:

1. Going from full-only to a weekly full backup and nightly differential can be an easy solution.

2. There are a number of performance-related parameters that you can tweak in Ola's scripts, you might be able to tweak these to get the performance that you want:

   • BlockSize
     Specify the physical blocksize in bytes.

     The BlockSize option in DatabaseBackup uses the BLOCKSIZE option in the SQL Server BACKUP command.

   • BufferCount
     Specify the number of I/O buffers to be used for the backup operation.

     The BufferCount option in DatabaseBackup uses the BUFFERCOUNT option in the SQL Server BACKUP command.

   • MaxTransferSize Specify the largest unit of transfer, in bytes, to be used between SQL Server and the backup media.

     The MaxTransferSize option in DatabaseBackup uses the MAXTRANSFERSIZE option in the SQL Server BACKUP command.