by Ken Task.
@Adrian ... what he said! (completely disable backup for the front page).
A thought ... if this will become a problem for most Moodle's, am wondering why the front page is backed up in the first place. Can't restore the front page anyway. The only reason I can think ... due to users ... could repopulate users to the same instance but that wouldn't carry their roles nor enrolled classes/work, would it? So restore of CID 1 would work only for the same server ... not as a migration strategy?
Wouldn't it be nice to have an option(s) to define what courses to auto backup? ... either by selection of the courses or by usage (heaviest used). I had to resort to creating two separate bash shell scripts using admin/cli/backup.php [meant for single course] ... looping through a list of course ID's .... one for very large courses (anywhere from 20 Gig to, believe or not, 139 Gig) and one for others as well as set those to cron jobs to provide automated backups for one site. Those worked but the catch 22 was a new course wouldn't be automagically added to the 'smallcourses' CID list.
Anyhoo ....
'spirit of sharing', Ken