Optimizing Laravel Backup for Large Websites: Best Practices for Handling Heavy Loads

[iwasherefirst2]

Hello Spatie/Laravel Backup Community,

I'm reaching out for advice on optimizing backups for a large website using your package. My site is hosted on a VPS with 250 GB of free space, and the site itself occupies about 10 GB with numerous files.

I've set up weekly backups to S3 storage using a cron job that archives everything before transferring. However, this process is extremely resource-intensive, taking about an hour and significantly slowing down my site during execution. Currently, the cron job is scheduled at 3:00 AM on Mondays, but due to my website's international audience, this timing isn't ideal.

Additionally, I frequently encounter backup failures with errors like: "The following parts had errors: - Part 27: Error executing 'UploadPart': AWS HTTP error: cURL error 56: OpenSSL SSL_read: Connection reset by peer, errno 104..."

This leads me to question my initial setup. Would it be more efficient to store my website's data directly on S3, thereby reducing the load on my VPS during backups? If so, should I consider using two separate S3 storage solutions from different providers for my live data and backups?

I'm looking for insights or best practices on handling backups for websites with large or numerous files. Any guidance or suggestions on how to streamline this process without overburdening my server would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance for your help!

[sawirricardo]

hi @iwasherefirst2 what did you do? I'm also facing this one

[iwasherefirst2]

@sawirricardo The issue was due to my VPS not being able to handle zipping and transferring 10 GB - it just didn’t have enough CPU/RAM.

What worked for me:
I moved all user files to bunny.net, which costs ~$1/month for 100 GB and includes a global CDN plus optional replication. I store files in Falkenstein (EU) and replicate them to São Paulo (LATAM).

I updated my application code so that user content is automatically stored locally and on bunny.net. I now use my VPS storage (250 GB free) and bunny.net’s replication as the backup layer for storage files.

As a result, I no longer use spatie/laravel-backup for file backups ,only for daily database backups.