Jake Wilson wrote at about 17:06:55 -0600 on Tuesday, April 12, 2011:
 > We have a production server on the network with several terabytes of data
 > that needs to be backed up onto our BackupPC server.  The problem is that
 > the production server is in use most of the day.  There is a lot of normal
 > network traffic going in and out.
 > 
 > I'm wondering what options there are for backing up the production server in
 > a way that will hinder the performance and network access as little as
 > possible.  I'm not too worried about the incremental backups because those
 > wont take that long and will happen at night.  But the first, initial big
 > full backup is going to take quite a while and I don't want the production
 > server borderline-unresponsive during the backup process.

I would find it hard to believe that BackupPC would throttle a
production server... Linux usually does a pretty good job of sharing
cpu, disk access, network access. And if one process throttles your
production server, then you probably have more fundamental issues you
need to deal with...

 > Here are some options I've been thinking about:
 > 
 >    - Backing up / but have most of the large directories and subdirectories
 >    excluded and slowly "unexclude" them one by one in-between full backups.
Too much hassle and still will "throttle" it during the smaller piece
 >    - rsync bitrate limit throttling?
Given that network bandwidth is probably rate limiting this should
help if your network is getting slammed.

 >    - Instead of backing up /, specify specific big directories one at a
 >    time, adding more and more in-between full backups.
Too much hassle and still will "throttle" it during the smaller piece

 > Anyone have any ideas or direction for this?  Or are there any built-in
 > config options for throttling the backup process that I'm unaware of?

Have you tried it and run into bottlenecks or are you just worrying in
advance? :P

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