Using Veeam to backup SQL Backups

[nmace]

We use SQL Server 2008 to backup several SQL databases (physical boxes) that write the backups to a SMB share that's a VMDK. That way our physical SQL boxes get backed via Veeam and the data backups can also be dedupe'd, replicated, etc as needed. We currently set the SQL backup jobs to compress the backups when they are written to disk. Now that I care about dedupe, should we turn off the compression? That will result is vastly larger backups, but it should (in theory) dedup much better. Is that correct?

[tsightler]

It's unlikely that you will get a significant amount of dedupe from SQL backups using Veeam since the smallest block we dedupe at is 256K. It's unlikely that any of your databases have identical 256K blocks so you'll get more benefit from compression since database generally have lot's of character data that compresses very well.