by Ken Task.
IMHO and from experience ... automated backups should allow finer controls.
While there are parameters (not size) for what to backup and how many to keep, I never could figure out how to get around a very large course (from memory it reached 130G and the auto backup would choke on that one course - could not control the order of courses) .
Had to resort to turning auto off, then creating 3 cron jobs of my own that used a moosh bash shell script that looped though a 'lc' (large course), 'mc' (medium), and 'sc' (small) id list at different days ... the lc on a weekend - non-prime time. At the time that 130G course backup used up of 25% of the data drive used for moodledata and backups.
The async could also have problems IF - large course and it was launched during prime time. Teachers in control of that.
My 2 cents, of course!
'SoS', Ken