Accra Backup Service provides a collections of tools to automate and streamline your backup process. Following are some easy to follow tips to speed up your backups.. Keep in mind that ultimately the time required to complete your backups is dependent on :
▪ THE SPEED OF YOUR DEVICE/SERVER
▪ THE SPEED OF YOUR CPU
▪ THE SPEED OF YOUR HARD DRIVE (I/O CAPACITY)
▪ THE SPEED OF YOUR INTERNET CONNECTION
▪ THE AMOUNT OF DATA TO BACKUP
1) Make certain to turn on the the Folder Cache option. This can significantly speed up your backups.
The Accra Backup Client compares folders on the local machine with corresponding folders on the server in order to determine whether or not it contains files that need to be backed up. This is the default behavior and is done for every folder on the client machine that is to be backup. When the folder cache option is enabled, Accra Backup Client creates a local cache file containing this list for comparison. This cached data is stored in a sub-folder called FolderCache off of the Windows ProgramData folder/Syncrify. Using local folder cache reduces the total time spent for backup. The amount of time reduced is directly proportional to the number of folders on the client machine to be backup - therefore you will see a significant time reduction for jobs containing thousands of folders. If the client does not have many folders, the speed reduction is not significant.
2) If you are backing up small files and require several backup version of the files, use the version option. The advantage is that a full copy of the file is saved and then only the changes to the file will be saved for each day the backup is run taking less storage space for your backups. The disadvantage is that multiple compare functions have to be done to only save the changes from one day to the next. This represents more time, CPU cycle and I/O's for the backup to complete.
Enable Versioning - multiple versions of every file are stored on the server. The number of older versions maintained on the server is defined by the administrator who is managing the Accra server. (contact your Accra representative for more information) A version is only created if a user modifies a file. When versioning large files such as the Filopto database, the versioning process can take a significant amount of time since it must first copy the file over to the backup server and then compute the delta difference to create the version information and file.
3) If backing up large files ( example; Filopto databases) you may want to not use the version option but rather create multiple profiles that contains the database file for each day of the week for which you want to have a backup version. For example by creating 7 distinct profiles you can have 7 backups versions of your database. When the backup will run for the given profile for the scheduled day it will overwrite the existing file saved for that day of the week with a current version. The benefits for this type of backup style is the time savings (time required to finish a backup). You can reduce the backup time by 50% compared to using the version option, since the comparison for the change from one day to the next is no longer required. The disadvantage is that a larger storage space is required to store multiple (full) copies of your database.
See the Accra Backup manual for more information http://backuphelp.accra.ca/
