Ola Hallengren’s free maintenance solution is widely used as a replacement for SQL Server maintenance plans. It’s a more powerful, flexible tool for backups, corruption checking, and index & statistics updates.
If you’re using it for backups, there are two quick, easy changes that can dramatically reduce your nightly job runtimes.
First, set @NumberOfFiles = 4.
SQL Server has internal bottlenecks for single-file backups, and striping your backups across multiple files removes that bottleneck. I’ve written about testing the number of files before, and in a perfect world you’d have the time to do that testing, but for starters, just