Honestly, I've never heard of the program you're using.
I personally prefer rsnapshot
(http://rsnapshot.org/) for my backup needs. The Ubuntu package is the same name.
Since it uses hardlinks, the first time it runs may use a lot of CPU time, but afterwards, it won't. (Especially if you have few files that change between backups -- which is the case for most people.) Likewise, it won't use much diskspace over time.
Having said that, I schedule backups in the middle of the night. So other than when I'm testing the configuration file, I don't really have a chance to notice the CPU time. This is unrelated to whether or not you are running this on a server; rsnapshot
can be run on the command line. Or, you can create a short-cut on your desktop to it.
Another suggestion is to just renice
the program so that it runs at a lower priority. If you need to do this automatically, then some short bash programming will be needed. See, for example, https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=36870 or just search for the phrase "automatic renice".
Off the top of my head, I don't know how to do it, but my guess is that you would have to:
- write a bash script that finds out the process ID
- run renice on it
- put this script in a
cronjob
and either make it run right after your backup starts or have it run repeatedly (i.e., every hour)
I guess the script might look like this, but you really need to clean this up as it's really off the top of my head:
#!/bin/bash
PID=`ps -ef | grep "<program name>" | grep -v "grep" | tr -s ' ' | cut -f 2 -d ' ' | head -n 1`
renice -10 ${PID}
The PID line does this in order:
- Gets a list of processes.
- Searches for .
- Removes any line that has both and "grep".
- Replace consecutive spaces into a single space.
- Grab the second column's values using space as a delimiter.
- Take the first line.
Hope this helps get you started!