Network transfer compression

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.

Internet mode clients compress transfers per default. You can put a client into “Internet only mode” by running “C:\Program Files\UrBackup\enable_internet_only.bat”

Cool that’s awesome to know. Where is that documented? I searched for “compression” and various other keywords in the administration manual and didn’t turn up anything about internet-only backups having compression.

It’d still be nice to have toggles for this in the server administration menu.

Can we put the client to “internet” mode on the Web Interface (Settings?)
To run this file on each every client is really a pain if you have many clients.

You could put the server in a separate (virtual) network, block UDP 35623 outgoing in the server firewall or add the clients via the “+add client” button as internet client.