Acronis Backup: how to optimize resource usage and backup performance

You can optimize energy consumption, network load and backup performance in Acronis Backup Cloud service of Acronis Cyber Cloud or Acronis Backup 12.5/12 by adjusting multiple settings including performance, backup compression, backup start time and others. This article provides you with details on these settings.

If you want to enhance backup performance, you can:

• increase backup priority, for details refer to the Performance option
• set compression level to normal or none, for details refer to the Compression level option
• set backup for the time when the overall load on the machine is low, for example late night or early morning
• adjust backup start time window, for details refer to the Distribute backup start times within a time window option
• set file filters to exclude unnecessary files from backup, for details see the File filters option
• enable changed block tracking when backing up virtual machines or physical machines running Windows OS, for details refer to the Changed Block Tracking option
• enable fast incremental/differential backup, for details refer to the Fast incremental/differential backup option
• enable multi-volume snapshot to speed up backup, for details refer to the Multi-volume snapshot option

If you don't want running backups to interfere with other tasks, you can:

• decrease backup priority, for details refer to the Performance option
• limit the hard drive writing speed or the speed of transferring the backup data through the network, for details refer to the Output speed during backup option
• set backup for the time when overall load on the machine is low, for example late night or early morning
• adjust backup start time window, for details refer to the Distribute backup start times within a time window option
• set file filters to exclude unnecessary files from backup, for details see the File filters option
• enable changed block tracking when backing up virtual machine, for details refer to the Changed Block Tracking option
• disable multi-volume snapshot, in this case the volumes' snapshots are taken one after the other, for details refer to the Multi-volume snapshot option (do not disable multi-volume snapshot when backing up data spanning multiple volumes; for instance, for an Oracle database)

If you want to reduce backup size, you can:

• set compression level to high, for details refer to the Compression level option
• set file filters to exclude unnecessary files from backup, for details see the File filters option
• use single-file backup or incremental backup scheme
• adjust retention rules to keep less versions of your backups, for details see Retention rules

If you want to make database backups less impactful on MS SQL Server performance, you can:

• Disable Log truncation in Backup options (see product documentation for more details). Note that in this case you will need to schedule log truncation by some other means, otherwise this server's transaction logs will grow indefinitely.
• Set SQL Server Recovery Model to Simple for as many databases as possible (this is also recommended because Acronis Backup backups make any other recovery model basically useless; it only makes sense to not set all databases to Simple if you also use alternative backup solutions that are point-in-time restore-capable). This option is NOT recommended for backup of AAG or Failover Cluster Instances.