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EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: Please attach a ZIP file containing your Akeeba Backup log file in order for us to help you with any backup or restoration issue. If the file is over 2Mb, please upload it on your server and post a link to it.

Description of my issue:
Hello,

I would like to ask for advice relative to two issues. Both issues are related to websites that grew large (over 300MB) over the years.

(i) The websites become slow during the time of the backup process.
Info on the server: it is a dedicated Liquid Web SSD Apache server with APCu cache. During the backup process, at a certain point, the Cpanel displays a physical memory limit reached warning.
Can you please advise whether/how this problem could be mitigated?
-- I zipped in and uploaded the full backup log files of two of my websites as well a screenshot of the Cpanel memory warning.

(ii) For both websites, the backup process takes much more than 15 minutes even-though the respective jpa files are less than 1GB: one is about 550MB and the other one is 850MB.
-- Can you please advise whether/how the backup process could be made faster?

Regards,
Tom

Tom,

Backups are hard on servers. We read and copy every single database record, we read, compress and archive every single file (not true but close enough for this discussion). Consider that your normal page visitor hits a few database records and a few PHP files and they're done. We're really tough on servers.

You have 256 Mb allocated to each of these sites. That's very generous and it would be unusual to exceed that amount. But keep in mind that every component, every plugin takes up more memory. What do you have installed that you don't really need? There are no errors or warnings in either log that would indicate that the site ran out of available memory while the backup was running. In any case, it isn't using 1 Gb of memory.

On cottagecarpets.ca you have a templates-old folder that doesn't look like it needs to be backed up. There are some big files and folders in there. You have an /images/.tmb that looks suspiciously like a cache folder. The filenames are all random garbage. I don't know what that one is, so don't exclude it unless you do. There are two large files, /templates/sablon/images/carpetfinal.psd and another copy of the same file in /templates-old. I'm pretty sure your website isn't using a .psd file. You can remove or exclude these to reduce the size of the backup and the work necessary.

Nothing jumped out at me from the baysidefurniture.com log file.

To speed up the backup, you can run the Configuration Wizard. It is a button at the top of the Configuration screen. That will optimize the backup timing settings for your server. The optimization makes it go as fast as possible.

If time is a problem, you might consider not baking up static folders, like images. Obviously you need to back them up in a "master backup" or manually copy them to a safe location. That process adds a step to a restore, you need to copy them back after you have restored your backup archive. Doing the backup overnight via CRON job is another option, you don't really care how long it takes and you care less that it slows down the site.

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