Change the behaviour of system backup

Hello everyone,

For my servers, I use weekly system backup (not admin/reseller backup) - becouse I like the way it is, clean and complete.

Well, in the past I had some problems with users having HUGE ammount of files within their directories, and I mean HUGE (+2 mil / files in their whole homedir) - that make the backup cron run very very slow - sometimes taking more than 6 hours for a total of 300GB of data to be backed up.

And ... I thinked about something. What about I could set sysbk utility in order to check the number of files before backup (find $dir -type f | grep -c .) and do not backup that user at all if it exceeds more than 100.000 files in his whole dir. Also, I thinked about some capacity limit (for example: if the user has more than 10 GB stored, then do not backup)

What do you think ? DA could give me a possibility to do this ... ?
I've read the tutorials, I got no clue at all about this.


I know how to do it on user initiated backup, my question is about automated (cron) system backup.
Thank you in advance.

You do understand that sysbk is not intended for restoring unless you know what you are doing right? Why dont you just use rsync or rsync over ssh to another remote server...its far better than sysbk. Sysbk is an old outdated backup that is meant to basically tar up files for you. If you think you are going to backup with sysbk and restore when something goes wrong without knowing where to put everything you are sadly mistaken. This is the #1 reason admin level backups were created to make automated backups and restores.

Not to mention that if any of the OS software versions or subversions, or any of the hosting stack versions or subversions are changed, you can't just restore files, you have to restore pieces of files and know exactly what pieces you need to restore.

Note to all: while I can and have successfully restored Sysbck backups, it can take upwards of 40 hours, and at our hourly rate, that's can be a lot of money. Please use the admin level reseller backup. If you've never tested a worst case restore do NOT assume you can do one.

Jeff