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Given some system needs to do daily backup of its data on harddrive. Backup implies essential load on harddrive storage. Backup procedure can last several hours. The system can execute some other read/write activities on harddrive in the meantime.

Here is the question:

  1. is it correct that laborious backup procedure can significantly slow down OTHER harddrive operations that run in parallel, both read/writes?
  2. in case p.1 answer is YES, then is it recommended to use a dedicated storage for backup?
  3. in case p.2 answer is YES, then is it enough to create a separate LOGICAL storage for backup (2nd logical drive on hard disk), or only separate physical disk would help to prevent performance issues during backup?
  4. any nuances if we are using a dedicated physical drive vs virtual storage provided by some cloud platform?
  5. do you think significant log writing activity can be harddrive performance issue trigger too? any empirical estimates that can help to understand if our backup will slow down other read/write operations? for example, "if system needs to write more than 50MB then it will slow down other disk processes"
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  • Are you backing up this system or to this system?
    – gronostaj
    Commented Dec 8, 2020 at 7:45
  • I am backing up this system. I.e. I have some component which needs to save some data to disk on regular basis. Question edited.
    – MiamiBeach
    Commented Dec 9, 2020 at 5:51
  • So internal data to internal drive? That's not a proper backup. It won't survive a power failure, ransomware attack and server room fire.
    – gronostaj
    Commented Dec 9, 2020 at 7:36
  • ok, then I can connect some outer harddrive to my environment.
    – MiamiBeach
    Commented Dec 14, 2020 at 14:07

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  1. Yes. Hard drives have extremely low iops because the disk needs to physically rotate. A backup going full tilt van heavily slow other systems read/writes.

  2. There is no 1 answer to this. You can limit the speed of the backup, or mirror your data and backup off a mirror or even abuse RAID. Also, not all backup procedures are that write heavy - especially incremental backups.

  3. Logically partitioning a disk won't solve your problem. The problem is disk rotation speed. (There are edge cases it could make some differemce thanks to "short stroking" but not enough to justify the strategy)

  4. There are not nuances, there can be a gulf of difference depending on how its implemented. Change the word "cloud" to "other peoples computers" and it becomes obvious. Depending on implementation it could make no difference or you could be trading disk io for bandwidth. Of-clurse cloud backups can be sent at time of write and versioned incrementally - a good strategy.

  5. Log writing to HDD can absolutely hurt disk performance - both by causing writes and fragmentation.

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