I’ve looked through the administration manual and don’t see any information as to whether transfers are compressed in-flight.
I have a machine that has as it’s only connection to the Urbackup server a very slow wifi link. The machine in question is just at the edge of the service area for the wifi AP that it’s connected to, and can’t be moved.
The machine is able to backup to urbackup just fine, the only issue that I’m having is that it’s transfer speed tends not to go above 1Mbit/second. So a backup from this machine takes roughly 3-5x the time it takes other machines to run a backup of similar size.
If I had an option to turn on in-flight file compression for this machine, using, e.g. lzo, or lzma2, I feel like the tradeoff of CPU time spent compressing would be worth the increased transfer speeds.
Future consideration might be that if the Urbackup server is using a filesystem that supports file compression, there might be a way to hand the filesystem the pre-compressed file as it comes in from the network, instead of needing to decompress just to have the filesystem recompress.
Ideally any compression options would be settable on a per-client basis, and even better would be a setting to allow the client / server to determine whether to use compression, and if so, what algorithm and compression setting to use. A “Figure it out” mode, if you will.
The “Figure it out” mode could learn over several backups which algorithms and settings provide the best over-all speedup, and once learned try to stick with those settings until the server sees drastic changes in the transfer speeds it’s seeing from that client, kicking off another search. I imagine that the “figure it out” mode would take several weeks of heuristic searching before it settled on a specific mode.