Looks like we need to get introduce deduplication to the DBMS world. In the virtual world, VMWare and Hyper V only keep one copy of the same block in memory, and when doing backups for that matter. Granted, we have transaction log and differential backups, but deduplication for database backups should be built into the backup subsystem. So if only 1% of the database blocks have changed, the backup command should only back up those blocks. During restores, ALL of the blocks should be retrieved without DBA intervention.

Backupand restore is an area where SQL Server isn't even where DB2 was in V3, back in the early 1990's.