Backups, rotate scheduling

[bear]

Using Cpanel backup to secondary HDD, runs nightly at 1AM. Weekly it rotates these backups into weekly/monthly using what appears to be rsync. Unfortunately, the backups take quite a while to complete on this box, and the weekly rotation happens at about noon on Mondays. This is probably the busiest time of the week for this box, and loads go pretty high.

Can I set the backup rotation to occur during the weekend, like maybe Sunday? I can't find out any info on it as I can't seem to locate the proper search term to find it (if it exists).
Any help?

[brianoz]

The rotation occurs at the end of the backup cycle and there's no way to postpone the cpanel rotation; the postcpbackup script runs after the rotation is done.

However, you can disable the rotation completely and just do your own rotation. From the cpbackup code, it looks like cpbackup will skip the monthly and weekly rotations, by editing the file /etc/cpbackup.conf and adding or editing the config lines BACKUPRETMONTHLY, BACKUPRETWEEKLY, with a 0 after them. You can then do the rotations yourself on the next weekend or when it suits. The perl code in cpbackup only checks the monthly directory modification time and looks for it to be older than a wek or a month, so its not hard to implement.

On another note, obviously if the backups finish faster that would help. There are three things that make a difference with backup speed: separate disk (as you have), more memory (3-4x from experience), and CPU. Perhaps not an option but just thought I'd mention it.

Also, the new cpanel release (11.24 I think) has some long-promised performance updates for backups so that may help.

Strange that the rsync bogs the machine down so badly.

Hope this is helpful ...

[bear]

Thanks brianoz, appreciate the information. I think things are bogging down because it's an aging box (with 2GB RAM) and the disk reads while processing is bottlenecking at the CPU. Lots of iowait while this runs, and with normal workday traffic to process as well, it's just too much.
Time to migrate these accounts to better hardware.

Why is it always around the holidays?