by Alain Raap.
@Ken I just tested this option with one of our 'headache' courses, normally this backup took 7 hours to finish, on the databaseserver with a Moodle instance and only PHP it took only 3 hours! So that's worth to take a look at
Main difference I think is that the backup script didn't have to write to an NFS share and that it runs on the same server as the data of Moodle. We have our webserver in a DMZ and DB server in BZ, connected via NFS share.