cpanel backups unreliable for me

[raysolomon]

I've been having cpanel backup issues on one of my busy servers.
It is configured in WHM to backup all accounts and FTP it to a NAS.
The problem is that it fails to backup most of the accounts.

I talked with the datacenter techs about this and they investigated and looked through all my log files for clues and could not find a reason for the cause. I even scheduled a full hardware diagnostic that took 6 hours to complete. They found no problems.

I do notice that the backup script uses a lot of CPU resources which causes a general slowdown of the entire server.

However, I like how the script does a backup of home directories, permissions, database, stats, etc and compresses it into a tarball and makes it easy to restore accounts when necessary.

I am starting to wonder if our server is powerful enough to handle the CPU load from the backup process. Maybe that is the root cause of the problem.

System specs:

Dell poweredge 2950 (1st generation)
2 x quad core xeons @ 2.0GHz
4GB memory
4 SAS 10,000 RPM HD's on Raid 10

What do you think? (experienced server admins only please)
Should we upgrade our server or is there a more efficient backup solution that does not use much resources?

[Spiral]

My experience has been most of these issues are caused by unusually large
log files left behind in /usr/local/apache/domlogs or /usr/local/apache/logs.

Also do a check on your sites and see what site is the largest and then
check that account to see if it contains any unusually large files.

By unusually large files, I would say several hundred MB to over a GB size.

The backup process generally munches up on these trying to recompress them.

[PlatinumServerM]

There's really no way of determining if those specs are sufficient or not because it depends on so many other factors that were not provided.

How much data is being backed up?
How many files in each account?
Is the backup configuration optimized?
What is the usual load of the server aside from the backup process?

[Spiral]

There's really no way of determining if those specs are sufficient or not because it depends on so many other factors that were not provided.

How much data is being backed up?
How many files in each account?
Is the backup configuration optimized?
What is the usual load of the server aside from the backup process?

Yes, as with anything, there are a great number of possibilities ...

However, the very first thing I would look for is extra large files as
a good 90% of all hung backups tend to rest around large files and
that would it be a very good place to start the search especially since
I've seen this same issue from the best of servers and weakest of servers.

If he's clean in that department though, then yes I would move on to
other factors and start asking more specific questions.