I run a database that has a tables with several NTEXT columns that contain short lived data. We would normally only keep a few weeks of data in those tables but in an effort to reduce disk usage this was reduced down to only 72 hours.
While I expected to see some increase in backup performance, I was not expecting such a large increase. The database dropped from 105 GB of storage to 99 GB with the change in data retention. Before the change backups would roughly take 60 minutes. After the change it dropped to 40 minutes to backup.
I assumed that with a 6% reduction of storage that it would be an equal reduction in backup time, but appears to have shaved off a third of the time required for backup.
Because the majority of the data that was removed was NTEXT, does this have a much larger impact on backup performance than other data types?
I have done some searching but I haven't been able to find any connection between the two things.
Edit: I left out that these are full backups running.
