I ran across a thread recently where someone was looking to estimate the time it too to perform a 600GB backup. I've seen other threads with similar questions. The general advice is that you need to run a backup and see how long it takes. After all, your hardware, your workload, the compression settings, and more will affect your backup time.

In researching speeds, I didn't find much info out there, so I thought I'd start a poll. This might be fun for you, so I'm hoping quite a few of you will answer.

How long does it take you to back up 1TB?

I know some of you don't have a 1TB database, and probably a few of you have much larger ones. However, look at your backup and extrapolate (or interpolate) the time it would take to complete a 1TB backup. Assume that your hardware would scale appropriately to allow you to run a 1TB backup if you actually had that much data.

If you can share your setup, or your configuration, that would be very interesting. I know some of you use striped backups, some compress, some use third party tools to help, and maybe you even have another way to actually get data from a live system into a backup file.

Over the years I've seen some amazing improvements in the backup and restore functionality that SQL Server provides. I think it's one of the most solid subsystems in SQL Server, and I'm looking forward to seeing just how fast some of you can create backup files.