IMCEDAs LiteSpeed backup software
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I just downloaded the trial version of this backup software and it looks too good to be true.
Did anybody had any bad experience with it?
Does anybody know an approximate price or something about their licencing policy? I tried to find it on IMCEDA 's web site, but I only found a sales dpt. email address.
Any information from users of this appealing software will be welcomed and appreciated.
Gabriela
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I've been testing with it, and you're right, it seems too good to be true. BUT, with everything that I hit it with, it worked exactly as advertised!
I don't yet have the pricing on it either, though.
Steve
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They charge it by number of processors the SQL Server runs. Call them to get the price, It is fairly reasonable.
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We have been using it for a number of months, and it seems to do ok.
Our backup routine is hand scripted, to handle a whole lot of potential clashes that the Maintenance Wizard was having troubles with. The xp_'s help: you can still script a backup.
I'm a little cautious however about the compression of the backups. It seems to be similar to zip, with no recovery record, so if a bit/byte/part of the file gets corrupted (which happens on tape) it seems the entire backup is useless. Luckily we haven't needed to rely on it for recovery so much, but more for moving huge (240GB+) databases. Recovery Records like RAR Compression does would make things safer.
Julian Kuiters
juliankuiters.id.au -
We have been using it for about a year now and it is very impressive. Since IMCEDA brought the company dbassociates, earlier this year the price of the product has doubled along with the support costs.
I was able to evaluate it on a HP 8 way machine connected to the fastest disk I have ever used (160mb/sec throughtput) writing out to 4 files. I had all 8 processors maxed out at 100% and I backed up a 100gig database in under 5 minutes.
On our current production system with an 4 way machine we can backup a 100gig database across 5 files in 15 minutes. This used to takeover 2 hours with a sql backup. The size of the backup file is 27 gig.
It also allows us to do test restores of production databases to a temp database because we now have the disk space available on the server.
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I started using the product about 3 years ago at another company when dbAssociates first started selling the product in the US. The interface was nonexistant, but the backups and restores work well. Now they have an interface which is great. At my new company we are using the product now, at my recommendation.
To test the product, time a backup, and time a restore and note the size of the backup. Now do the same thing with LiteSpeed, note the difference in the size of the backup and the difference in the times to backup and to restore the database. If this doesn't impress you, then you probably don't have the need.
LiteSpeed shines on db > 20gb, on small databases it probably would not be worth the expense.
John Campbell
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I wish I had a better report. I work at a large energy company and we bought the product a while back. It did do backups pretty quick, but when we went to do a restore of the compressed backups, it failed with corruption errors. Needless to say, we're back on standard SQL backups.
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We've been using it for about 18 months and have had no issues regarding restores. Our database is about 170 gb and it compresses it down to about 21 gb.
Terry -
I've also been using Sql Litespeed on several boxes backing up around a terabyte of data across all servers. I had some issues with the older 3.0.123 and up untill the new 3.1.x versions all of that is running very well. All my backup and restore scripts are centered around litespeed as well. I don't use maint plans or the gui that ships with SLS at all. I will say the new gui is much much better than the last one was. We are averaging 8:1 compression and at least a 75% reduction in backup times and around 15% reduction in restore times.
Wes
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To Answer Julian's point about if part of the backup file gets corrupt then you are gone due to the use of compression.
The Approach we have taken at Imceda, is that we compress the data in small discreet blocks, so this means we don't need the whole file to perform decompression. Obviously if you have problems with your disk drive and you have a corrupt block or two, then you will be in the same position as a native backup file. Don't forget LiteSpeed files can be converted back to Native at anytime.
If you use a native SQL Server backup file and part of the file becomes corrupt, then the backup file will not restore. If you have this issue you may get sympathy, but you won't get support from anywhere. YOUR DATA IS GONE!
The BIG advantage you have with Imceda and LiteSpeed, is we can recover data from a corrupt SQL Server backup file, so with ourselves you at least stand a chance of recovering most of your data, depending on the condition of your file. We also have in Beta, a new feature that will allow you to extract individual tables from a FULL backup file, even including damaged backup files.
Regards
Douglas Chrystall
Imceda Software
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SQL Server 2005/Yukon supports mirrored backups to minimize the risk of media corruption. So does another product, now.
SQL BAK Explorer - read SQL Server backup file details without SQL Server.
Supports backup files created with SQL Server 2005 up to SQL Server 2017. -
This isn't an endorsement, but some thoughts.
I tested SQLZip and Litespeed (v2.x) a few years back. SQLZip had better compression, but used lots of CPU. Litespeed gave me a good balance and I implemented it at JD Edwards/Peoplesoft. We had large and small databases, over a quarter terabyte a night of differential backups that was reduced to < 100GB. And it was quicker. Using the compression level of 2, we were able to reduce backup times from a couple hours for our largest databases (full backup, 500GB+ db) to less than an hour. Plus the reduction in file size (we did local backups) translates to lower tape cost and quicker backups. Not as much data moves across the network. In over two years of backing up hundreds (literally) of databases each night and logs during the day, I haven't had any issues with file corruptions. I have restored probably a third of those databases multiple times with no issues. I have even extracted the backups back to SQL native with no issues.
We also use Litespeed here at SQLServerCentral. Not to say that the other products don't work. we loved litespeed and went with it. They gave us licenses as well for free. Again, not that the other companies wouldn't do that, but Litespeed got to us first and we are happy with their product.
To be fair, I didn't spend a lot of time on SQLZip, especially after seeing the CPU load, but the product worked well. I have asked someone to do a review of MiniSQLBackup (above), but haven't looked at it. I did look briefly at the BMC Backtrack product, but it wasn't as cost effective for me as Litespeed.
In general I avoid the agent based backups from Veritas, BackupExec, etc. However I haven't seen the same issues with the compression vendors.
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I have had an excellent experience with SLS - in the years I have been working with it, I have done a multitude of restores – all were successful. It has reduced 100gb database backups to 1/6 their original size and executes in a significantly shorter time than SQL native backups. In addition, it is reasonably priced.
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Very nice product. It dumps 13Gb in less then 5 minutes on our SAN. And you see virtually no load on the processor's. I am very happy that I found this product, because we keep 3 days of backup's on disk, and the total needed drive-space is a lot less now. I do reletively often a restore (from PROD to DEV, SYS or ACC environment for testing) and have never had a problem.
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Hello :
We've been running SQL LiteSpeed for several months here too, v3.0.123.x (now v3.0.124.0).
When we tested it we were wildly impressed, but either we didn't test it enough or thouroughly enough... once in production we'd have random recovery and validation failures... sometimes for no appearant reason. The GUI stuff was close but not ready for prime time yet... and also if used it with Maintenance Plan stuff, ( oldest revs of .123) were kind of hokey. Also, there was some issue (which neither we nor Imceda ever resolved) which prevented us from using multi-threaded backup/restores... we're doing everything single-threaded...
I want to believe this is 'diamond in the rough' kind of stuff, and am happy to report that since running v3.0.124, we've only had two considerably minor issues - one, which we fixed by rebooting, and he other is that we noticed at some times the GUI doesn't / can't do a point in time restore because the 'time box' won't let you set the time you want... kinda wierd...
I am looking forward to the new version, which we haven't tried yet, because we're little gunshy from the fun we had with 3.0.123.x.
One other thing to consider is it's integration with other products... we have Lumigent's Log Explorer and are going to purchase their Entegra tool... both of which rely on dumped T-Logs to do their work, and they do not read Imceda's compressed format. so.... we'll wind up dumping db's with SQL LiteSpeed, but have to dump TLogs natively... unless we want to spend time extracting the SLS (SQL LiteSpeed) dump back to Native before we use it... We've asked the vendors to put it our their wish-list.
Thanks -- Mike
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