My WSE 2012 system is scheduled to create a server backup every night starting at 1am. It backups to another SATA hard drive, the full backup contains about 700GB.
Usually I'm not working at that time, but when I do, I sometimes notice that the server is practically not usable anymore during the time the backup is created. I.e. every access to a file on the server takes ages and any attempt to access the server through remote access (Dashboard, RDC or any other means) is practically impossible. Even logging on to the server on the local console is almost impossible.
Granted, the server hardware is not exactly high end server equipment, more like standard run-of-the-mill equipment:
A i5-3470 CPU (3,2GHz) on a H77 chipset with 4GB RAM.
A Samsung SSD 830 for the system a WD Red 3TB for the data. Another WD Green as the target of the backup. And several more HDs which are not part of the backup procedure.
It seems that the system's I/O is completely congested during the backup, to a state that it cannot do anything else anymore. The HD LED is just constantly lit, it doesn't even flicker anymore.
Is that normal behaviour? I guess not. Does anyone have an idea what could cause this behaviour? Is there maybe another task scheduled around 1am that interferes with the backup so that the system becomes so overloaded?
Client backups, btw, are scheduled to be done between 10-11pm. And I checked that they are indeed not running anymore at 1am.