Should I switch from compressed to Incremental backups

[TAK]

As of this past month, cpbackup has started to take a toll on our main server. It backs up about 250 accounts (most are smaller sites, with an exception of a few) using around 30 GB of disk space, every second day. The server is a Dual Xeon 2.8 Ghz w/ 2x160 GB drives. It runs very nicely most of the time with an average load of 0.20, but when bacukps get started the monitoring emails from the datacenter starting a'ringing.

So my question is, would swithing to incremental backups the the right route to take to decrease this load (instead of using compressed backups), or is there a better way to decrease the load caused by cpbackup?

Thanks.

 

[chirpy]

Your scenario suggests that the monitoring tools need to have their thresholds changed. tarballing and gzipping files use a great deal of disk I/O and CPU and will always tax a server, no matter the spec. The only thing you can effectively control is how long that process will take and then only by throwing hardware at it.

You can certainly switch from compressed to incremental backups, but of course they will use up much more disk space and are harder to manipulate (especially if you copy them off-server for backup redundancy). They will still, inevitably, involve high disk I/O, but will be far less CPU intensive.