I investigated some time to move the automated backup process outside the Moodle cron and to our DB server.
I installed a copy of Moodle on our DB server, wrote a bash script that runs the automated_backups.php script
via the Linux cron (https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=383815). I also explain here how I configured
this in Moodle and in Linux.
I first tested this process carefully on our production-like environment with the same data and database. When
I got this finally working, I installed the Moodle instance on our DB production server and ran two runs this
weekend that ran without problems (and a lot faster!!).
We have around 4100 courses that must be processed and that took about 8:42 hours to backup 331 courses.
When we ran this process on the webserver (via Moodle cron), it didn't finish a lot of times and it took a lot
effort to keep this task running (it didn't run good anymore for new courses https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=383012).
NFS is the bottleneck in this process, now the task runs on the DB server we solved this performance problem.
Just share my experience here for others that run into the same problem with backup processes that don't perform well
or aren't running in sync anymore.
by Alain Raap.