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Everything is in order, but it is going to take a long time to complete my backup. I'm certain my file is not much larger than it was at the time. It is about 200MB in size.

Is there anybody who can offer a way for me to escape this tedious subject?

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Dani AI

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Short diagnostic checklist and quick fixes for slow cPanel backups (follow-up to and ).

Server-side work—not raw network transfer—is often the bottleneck. Common causes are many small files (metadata/seek overhead), CPU-bound compression, database dumps, disk I/O contention, or host-side throttling/queued backup jobs. The steps below help find which one it is and give practical workarounds.

Check size, file count and free space (SSH access required):

du -sh /home/username
find /home/username -type f | wc -l
df -h /home

If file count is huge, creating a tarball can be slow. Test raw archive speed without compression:

tar -cf /home/username-test.tar /home/username

If that is fast but tar+gzip is slow, CPU compression is the problem. Options:

  • Create an uncompressed tar and download then compress locally.
  • Use a parallel compressor (pigz) on servers that have it.
  • Use rsync to pull files off the server (incremental, efficient for repeats):
rsync -a --partial --progress /home/username/ user@backup.example.com:/backups/username/

For databases, dump them separately and avoid table locks for InnoDB:

mysqldump --single-transaction -u dbuser -p databasename > databasename.sql

If SSH/root is not available (shared hosting), ask the provider for:

  • The backup job status and timestamps.
  • Any I/O or CPU throttles and whether backups run in a queue.
  • Backup logs from the cPanel/WHM logs directory so you can show them exact failures/times.

Cautions: ensure there is enough free disk space before creating tarballs; test a restore occasionally. If the host admits throttling or refuses to investigate, consider a provider that offers account-level exports or offsite snapshots.

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Member Avatar for bijutoha

It was incredible to me as well! However, it was very painful, and I eventually discovered that the issue was mostly with the hosting company.

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