Inefficient Backup System

At Hawk Host we use a combination of the standard cPanel system, but using the script BMU to handle doing our backups.  The system is setup to do a certain percentage of backups per day so over the course of 7 days it makes a complete set of backups.  This system is pretty good compared to backing up all accounts each day and having no script to make sure the loads do not get to high.  Sounds great right?  Well I decided to take a look at our bandwidth graphs for the last month and I was surprised by just how much private network based traffic we are producing each month.

Here is the bandwidth graph for the month of May for our Bosco server

So how much bandwidth is that exactly?  Well that is 2000GB worth of data going into our backup server every month.  But wait a second Bosco isn’t even using 1TB of space in total!

Now here’s the bandwidth graph for one of the higher days of the month which generated 90GB of data!

What’s best about this is this is suppose to be an incremental set of backups and we do not generate archives or anything of that nature.

Thankfully we do not pay for bandwidth that does not go out to the Internet so that means we’re not actually being charged any money for this.  But even so that is a lot of data going through our backup machine each month.  As a result of this we’re looking at other solutions such as R1Soft and Evault as better backup solutions that are really incremental and could allow us to do 5 minute backups if we wanted to.  These systems would also generate lower load than our current backup systems do to their integration into the actual operating system opposed to just a rsync or some other fancy but inefficient way of generating backups.