Backup and restore

Ken, just thinking out loud, would it be possible to run a bash script against the automated backup php script?
I built a bash script that reads a file with course-ids, calls the backup cli script for each course-id  and that is
run via the Linux cron in the weekend. Only  that script doesn't look at the number of days of a course last
change in the parameters or the number of backups that must be present of each course. I'd like to find a
way to exclude the 'problem'  courses and to run the automated backup without the courses that make the run
fail each time.

This is the (simple) bash-script (file courses.txt contains the course-ids) to run a backup list outside Moodle cron;

#!/bin/bash
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Script: backup_moodle_courses.sh
#
# - Backup a list of courses with admin/cli/backup.php
#
# Writer:       Alain Raap
# Date:         24-01-2019
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
exec > >(tee -i /tmp/backup_moodle_courses.log)
exec 2>&1

# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Set parameters
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SCRIPT="backup_moodle_courses"
COURSES="/tmp/courses.txt"
COMMAND="$MOODLE_ROOT/admin/cli/backup.php"
PHP="$PHP_COMMAND_PATH"
BACKUP_PATH="/path-to-your-automated-backup-courses-map"

echo "${SCRIPT}: Start backup script"
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Read input file with course-id's to backup
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
while read COURSE_LINE ; do
   ID="$(echo ${COURSE_LINE} | cut -d',' -f1)";
   NAME="$(echo ${COURSE_LINE} | cut -d',' -f2)";
   echo "${SCRIPT}: Backup of course: " $ID " - " $NAME;
   echo "$PHP $COMMAND --courseid=${ID} --destination=${BACKUP_PATH}"
   $PHP $COMMAND --courseid=${ID} --destination=${BACKUP_PATH}
done < ${COURSES}

echo "${SCRIPT}: End backup script"
exit 0

Example courses.txt:

1500,Course A
1501,Course B
1502,Course C
1503,Course D

@Ken I also tried this option, to make a backup with a Moodle instance on the database server. It looked like it wasn't much faster, and I also see that writing the course-files to the filesystem is slow in my opinion. What is your speed when writing to disk in the temporary folder of Moodle? And did you tweak any configuration settings for this backup configuration (database or PHP)?

Just a tip before you try to configure/test this, if you're using a caching server (like Memcache or Redis) that's not installed on your database server, remove the caching server in the plugin configuration settings (Plugins -> Caching -> configuration in Admin). This will prevent errors in your PHP error log. Otherwise the backup script won't work.

Had the same here with 3.4.6+ and even a 1.2 GB backup took a long time and its just a specific one I wanted to test to see how long it would take via CLI method. Users reported it took so long they quit.. note that I have turned off cron.php just in case so nothing is running that may have an effect with our db server's computing resources.

I came across a setting for automated backup but I can't remember where to turn it off/disabled other than in scheduled task. The other setting was a drop down menu.. can't remember where I saw or how I came across it.. maybe through backup report.