Have you considered compressed backup?

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Hi Ten Centuries and Hall of Fame,

the backup already has compression turned on.

Please forgive me if I seem daft, but I am new to this...

If I have a DB that is 100 gig in allocated size however the data in the DB is only 50 gig, are you saying that the backup will be 50 gig and not 100 gig?

If that is so, then if I am able to archive/delete/cleanup the DB and reduce the data from 50 gig to 40 gig wouldn't my backup them be 40 gig?

as you said the backup only contains used pages and not empty pages and backed up white space occupys no space

Please do have patience.