A backup that takes three hours to run and fills up your storage every week is not sustainable. Backup optimization is about making your backup setup more efficient without compromising what matters: completeness, reliability, and speed of recovery.
Where backup inefficiency usually comes from
- Backing up what does not need to be backed up — Cache files, temporary files, and log files add significant size to backups without adding recovery value. Excluding them reduces backup size and run time
- No compression — Uncompressed backup files take longer to transfer and more space to store. Compression is standard practice and most backup setups support it
- Running backups at peak traffic times — Backups that run during high-traffic periods compete for server resources. Scheduling them during low-traffic hours (e.g. late night) avoids this
- Retaining too many or too few copies — Keeping 90 days of daily backups is expensive and rarely necessary. Keeping only 2 days is too few. A tiered retention policy — daily for 7 days, weekly for a month — balances coverage and storage cost
- Full backups every time — Incremental backups, which only save changes since the last backup, are faster and smaller than full backups. For large sites, incremental is worth considering
What not to optimise away
Efficiency is not the primary goal — reliability is. Do not exclude important files or reduce frequency in pursuit of smaller backup sizes. The point of optimisation is to make the system run better, not to cut corners on what gets protected.
Questions about how your current backup setup is configured? A website checkup covers this. Our maintenance service handles backup management as standard. More in the backups knowledge base.