Ok, this isn't directly related to SQL Server but it did help me with moving some data around. 

Recently I inherited yet another SQL Server (2000 with no Service Paks...ouch!) and of course my first call of the day is a user saying that they heard that I took over the server and it is experiencing performance problems.  You just have to love your job some days. 

Upon doing some basic investigation, I saw the C partition was at a roomy 100MB on a good day.  Ok, we all know that isn't enough.  The D partition had about 400GB and both were on the same RAID 5 volume.  Ok, pretty simple, I will just use my Acronis Disk Director Server to resize the partitions and we are back in business. 

Ok, I am neurotic but not crazy so I wanted to make a backup. This server contained one database on the D partition that was 123GB in size.  My first thought was to stop SQL server and copy to a network share but that would take a fair chunk of time and I didn't want to take that long.  I also know that a SQL Backup would take just as long. 

My next thought was to contact the network team and have them do a Symantec's Veritas Backup Exec backup of this database but again that was going to take about 8-10 hours and we wouldn't have enough space to install the local SQL agent.   Still too much down time. 

My next thought was to install Red-Gate's SQL Backup as we use that on our other servers and get a pretty decent compression out of it for our daily backups, but unfortunately, we didn't have enough free space on the c partition.

My next thought was to detach the database and Zip it to something more manageable.  I have been an ardent user of WinZip since the very early years (DOS...remember that?) but after doing some test that was still going to take about 7-8 hours.  Better but still too long as I wanted to get to other things today. 

A few days ago, my network team raved about a new program called 7-Zip and they said it was free and really really awesome...his words not mine.  So I gave them a call and had the install in a few minutes. This baby was small (818K) so it was going to be able to install in the small space we had. 

After playing around with the application a bit, I started my compression and I choose the fastest speed to see how long it would take.  According to my estimated it would take about 4 hours to compress my 123GB database. 

I started it up and let it run.  It was crunching away and was quite impressive although the interface could use some work.  It took my 123GB database and in 3.75 hours it had a compressed file of 9.4GB.  Yes, that is not a typo.  I was floored myself.  Now I could easily copy the compressed file to the network and get on with the repartitioning.