What are the best practices for balancing backup performance with resource usage?

2 Schedule backups wisely

Another factor that affects backup performance and resource usage is the timing of your backups. You should schedule your backups to avoid peak hours, high workload periods, or conflicting tasks that may compete for resources or cause contention. You should also consider the impact of your backup frequency on your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). RPO is the maximum amount of data loss that you can tolerate in case of a failure, and RTO is the maximum amount of time that you can afford to restore your data. Generally, the higher your backup frequency, the lower your RPO and RTO, but also the higher your resource usage and performance overhead. You should balance your backup frequency with your RPO and RTO requirements, as well as your resource constraints.

3 Optimize backup settings

Another way to improve backup performance and resource usage is to optimize your backup settings. Depending on your database system, you may have various options to configure your backup settings, such as compression, encryption, verification, checksum, parallelism, buffer size, or file splitting. Each option has its own pros and cons in terms of performance and resource usage. For example, compression reduces the backup size and I/O, but it also increases the CPU usage and may affect the backup speed. Encryption enhances the security of your backups, but it also increases the CPU usage and may affect the backup speed. Verification ensures the integrity of your backups, but it also adds extra time and I/O to your backup process. Checksum detects any corruption in your backups, but it also adds extra time and I/O to your backup process. Parallelism increases the backup speed by using multiple threads or processes, but it also increases the CPU and I/O usage and may affect other tasks or applications. Buffer size determines the amount of memory allocated to your backup process, which affects the backup speed and I/O, but it also affects the memory usage and may affect other tasks or applications. File splitting divides your backup into multiple files, which reduces the backup size and I/O, but it also increases the complexity and management of your backups. You should optimize your backup settings according to your performance and resource goals, as well as your backup type and frequency.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?