One thing to note WRT the effect of backups on users, is that the Windows
task scheduler is not (or at least was not) as advanced as the Linux
scheduler. It was a lot easier for one resource-hungry process to slow down
the whole system. Windows has gotten better over the years; but I suspect
there may still only be so much you can do.

The Crashplan (commercial) backup client does have an automatic throttling
feature which works pretty well. This depends on having a full-featured
client program on the machine to be backed up tho. I know there was work
done towards that years ago; but it seems to have dropped off the radar.

In cases where limited CPU/disk/Internet bandwidth has caused user
inconvenience due to backups competing for resources, I use the '--bwlimit='
option to rsync. This obviously slows down *all* the backups of that host,
but it does solve the problem of inconveniencing the user.

-- 
Carl Soderstrom
Systems Administrator
Real-Time Enterprises
www.real-time.com

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