Well, not bad for openers. If it’s just for an occasional backup that you perform from time to time it may do the trick. However for a serious use with a regular backup operation of databases from mid to large when we are taking about business procedures I’d recommend looking to Scriptlogic’s Litespeed http://scriptlogic.com/products/litespeed/ . First off I like that Scriptlogic’s tools implement a granular configuration that allows you fine-tune compression settings based on more than a dozen compression levels. That’s even more important because you can do that even on SQL server 2005! But it’s strongest part I think is security that you can set to be applied for any database you backup selecting from several encryption algorithms implemented in the tool. For a corporate use it has a very nice feature allowing you to create a self-extracting databases archive and store in on remote place. So if you have to hand it the database to another person such as another admin in a remote office in your company you or a person in working in another company you can just upload the database file to this person and he/she will be able to restore it to its server without needing to have Litespeed installed in his/her environment. What’ s also great in the tool is of course its GUI. It has one of the best backup procedure implementations that I’ve seen implemented among various backup tools. The magic is in a double-configuration scheme implemented with the tool. You can configure its settings using its step-by-step wizards so you don’t have to be a SQL wizard to be able to create a database backup. Or you can select a quick method allowing to configure backup settings right in a single point. It supports various backup devices types including even Tivoli Storage Manager which is of a great use for a corporate tasks. And it has a fantastic database backup tracking that allows you to quickly revise backup state based on the database colourings showing which databases were backed up and which demand backing up. When we are talking about compression we immediately start dealing with CPU load. And multicore CPUs that we have nowadays that’s important to effectively balance the load using multithreading and thread distributions via cores using affinity tuning. That all I can quickly configure via Litespeed. Moreover I can create different settings for various databases thus creating dedicated backup plans allowing me effectively distribute server resources across backup jobs.