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Proving the Restore, Part 5: Striped Backups Are All or Nothing

2026-08-27 · by Hannah Vernon · in recovery

Large databases are often backed up across several files at once. Instead of one 800 GB file, you get eight files of about 100 GB, written in parallel:

Transact-SQL
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BACKUP DATABASE [Sales]
TO   DISK = N'D:\Backups\Sales_FULL_S00.bak'
   , DISK = N'D:\Backups\Sales_FULL_S01.bak'
   , DISK = N'D:\Backups\Sales_FULL_S02.bak'
   , DISK = N'D:\Backups\Sales_FULL_S03.bak'
WITH CHECKSUM, COMPRESSION;

The motivation is throughput. Several writers…

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