any way to reduce disk I/O during backups?

[Ebridge]

I know this has been covered before, but does anyone know a way to reduce the disk I/O during FTP-backups?

Nice and ionice are already set to their lowest priority for cpbackup, yet the disk I/O often peaks at 100% for several minutes, making websites totally unresponsive.

If only cpbackup would peak at just 90% disk I/O, our websites would still be responsive enough (and we wouldn't loose clients like we do now because of this).

We can live with backups taking slightly longer to complete, but having all normal hosting processes come to a stop several times a night is hardly acceptable.

 

[caisc]

Solution to this is get yourself SSD this will resolve the I/O bottleneck.

 

[chrismfz]

Did you tried both ? Together ?
Something like

nice -n 19 ionice -c2 -n7 /script/file/goes/here

If you don't take local backups on the same disk why you don't try incremental on a remote backup server using rsync ?

 

[Martin.Harper]

Hello,

I am not sure about your budgets but another solution would be to try a third party backup tool that work on block level. I know R1soft worked great for my last company, I remember it finishing a 250 GB incremental backup in few mins without affecting server performance, it does veeeerrrry long first time tough. Their restoration time for entire server with OS was below 4 hrs.