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Compressed Backup bigger than Original Database??

This is a strange one. I just installed SQL Backup 5.2 (Build 2825) on to one of my SQL 2000 servers. I backed up all of the databases, and most of them had compression rates between 85 and 95%. A couple of the slightly larger ones only got 80%, but still pretty good.

However there was one database that actually had a -6% Compression... The database is 17.3 GB, but backed up to an 18.3 GB file. Obviously everything is installed correctly on the server, and since all of the backups were from a single job, the compressions setting didn't change between databases.

Is there anything in the database that I can look at to try and figure this out? I ran a DBCC CHECKDB() on the database and it didn't report any errors. The database is from a 3rd party vendor, but other than that, I can't think of anything special. The database is in the FULL Recovery Model and the Transaction log is under 300MB and gets backed up regularly.

Thanks for any suggestions...
wayneph
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  • petey
    If the database contains pre-compressed data e.g. zipped archives, png image files, jpeg image files, there is a possibility that compression level 1 results in a larger file. In these cases, you could try using compression level 2 and see if it results in a smaller file. If the space saving is not significant, I would suggest using native SQL Server backups then. If you are also encrypting the file, then use compression level 0.
    petey
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