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Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

#39032 Backup takes forever

Posted in ‘Akeeba Backup for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
4.3.1
PHP version
8.0
Akeeba Backup version
9.6.1

Latest post by tampe125 on Tuesday, 30 May 2023 05:59 CDT

Malalana

Hello there,

I just purchased, installed, and configured Akeeba Backup.

Taking a backup with Akeeba Backup takes an absurdly long time.

For example, just one table with 1 million rows seems to take an infinite amount of time to backup during the Akeeba Backup process (eg. over 1 hour).

If I log in to phpmyadmin and simply export the table from there, it takes like 5 seconds.

I don't see the point in using Akeeba Backup if the backup times are this long (1+ hour)... This is infinitely more inconvenient than simply logging into phpmyadmin and exporting the database, which takes a couple of minutes at most.

Any insight?

tampe125
Akeeba Staff

Salve,

una tabella con 1 milione di righe è effettivamente lunga da processare, tenga conto che Akeeba Backup utilizza impostazioni abbastanza conservative per evitare di raggiungere il timeout e, soprattutto, creare un archivio che possa essere ripristinato su quasi tutti i server.

Detto questo, potrebbe controllare il valore del campo "Number of rows per batch" all'interno della configurazione del profilo? Dovrebbe essere su 1000

Davide Tampellini

Developer and Support Staff

🇮🇹Italian: native 🇬🇧English: good • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Rome (UTC +1)
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Malalana

Hello,

Setting the "Number of rows per batch" to 1000 resulted in a much faster database backup, 7 minutes instead of over 60 minutes.

However, this is still much slower than simply exporting the database from phpmyadmin, which only takes about 30 seconds.

How comes?

tampe125
Akeeba Staff

Hello,

I'm sorry if previously I wrote in Italian, I saw your country from business information and I switched to Italian.

Using phpMyAdmin it will be faster, but you'll be more prone to errors and handling the resulting file will be more difficult. For example, Akeeba Backup will use abstract table names without the prefix (ie #__example instead of aaa_example) so you can change it during restoration. At the same time, we split the output in several different files so it will be easier to restore (and some hosting providers are blocking files too large).

On top of that, we're reading the database contents in batches, again to work around hosting limitations.

At the end of the day, it's just a tradeoff: you're exchanging some time vs a more reliable process. Since you're taking backups to be prepared if something wrong happens, it's way better to be safe than sorry and spend a little more time but be sure that the data inside it is not corrupted.

Davide Tampellini

Developer and Support Staff

🇮🇹Italian: native 🇬🇧English: good • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Rome (UTC +1)
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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