Matthew McGiffen joins two great flavors:
In SQL Server you can also compress your encrypted backups. Unlike TDE this has been possible with Backup Encryption since the feature was first made available, and there have been no issues that have required fixing – though as always you should still test that restores work correctly. As mentioned in my post about compression with TDE, compressing backups has benefits not just in terms of file size but potentially also in reduced backup times as the time taken to write to disk is smaller.
Read on for more information. Microsoft did the right thing: they compress first and then encrypt; otherwise, you’re not getting any benefit from the compression.