rsnapshot makes my machine slow to a crawl
 

So I recently started using rsnapshot to back up the three computers on my home network to the media/file server. It works great...except for one thing. Whenever the every-four-hours backup kicks in, my system gets so slow you can barely use it. I think it's just taking over hard disk access, because I can type in a window fine, for instance, but some other actions like loading files or sometimes browsing the Web freeze up for about 15 seconds before coming back.

What I'd like is a way to limit rsync's processor usage. I don't care if it takes a little while longer, there's no particular hurry. And I have a pretty powerful computer, so I don't see any reason it can't run a program and copy a file at the same time.

I tried using ionice -p [pid] 3, which is supposed to make the process only access the disk when it's otherwise idle, but it didn't really help. Besides, I'd have to run that every time the backup started. Turning off four-hourly backups also isn't a viable solution, because I don't have the system on all the time, so I need to have a few backups at times when I'm likely to have it on to be sure it gets backed up at all.

So, is there some tool I'm missing, or another solution?

Hmm, I tried renicing both sshd and rsync to a value of 19. That was a heck of a lot better, but still leaves something to be desired. And it would be extremely annoying to set that every time I'm using the computer while the backup comes on. I suppose I could set a cron job to do that, but that would be a bit silly.

You should use the 'nice' cmd when you invoke the backup job ie cron entry.
http://linux.die.net/man/1/nice
http://linux.101hacks.com/monitoring...mand-examples/

The problem is that rsnapshot is invoked from the server end, so it'd be pretty pointless to nice it on the server--I'd be happy to let the server run as much as it wants, it's my desktop I don't want to lock up. (Or am I wrong and might that help anyway?)