Saturday, July 10, 2010

Minimizing Performance Hit when Running Home Server Backup

I’ve always been annoyed by my home server backup. It always starts when I start the PC and then it eats a lot of resources. I often either postpone the backup or change its priority to low which more importantly reduces the IO priority to low as well.

But why not automate the latter?

And that is easy:

  • Start Event Viewer
  • Find HomeBackup event 768 in the Application log
  • Right-click specifying attach task to event
  • Follow the wizard, specify powershell.exe as program and ‘-noprofile c:\IdleBackupEngine.ps1’ as argument.
  • At the end of the wizard, select to open properties afterwards and change the task to use SYSTEM with highest privileges enabled
  • Finally, create c:\IdleBackupEngine.ps1. It only contains a single line: (gps backupengine).priorityclass="idle"

Have fun – working *during* the backup