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Comment by craigmccaskill | Hacker News Reader

A concern I always have over services like this, is that they tend to back up at the most inopportune times. Holding a VC and your call suddenly drops? Playing an FPS or RTS game and things start to become unresponsive? Uploading your latest project files, wondering why it's going so slowly while a is client clamouring for it yesterday? Chances are one of your many automatic backup services just kicked in. With devices like the iPad and iPhone being 'always on' and connected to the wifi in the background, I can see this becoming a problem. When these sorts of services were confined to a desktop or laptop, you could always shut them down with a simple right click on a task bar/menu icon. Now you have multiple devices that could potentially be bogging down your network, how do you easily diagnose where the network drain is coming from?

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This is a great point. I have had problems with Spotlight aggressively indexing my hard drive in the middle of a SC2 match. I've also had Time Machine pick terrible times to slow down my system.

What's incredibly annoying about these services is they don't do the obvious thing and wait until the computer has been idle for a while.

Have the same issue with Time Machine - clearly needs a better way of detecting the system in an idle state.

Not really sure what the problem is, a screen saver manages to work perfectly well detecting when I'm not using the computer.

I guess the assumption is that most people don't leave their computers on all the time, so it's designed to run as a background task else it wouldn't actually get to run at all.

Same annoyances with computers in general. You're urgently downloading a huge uncompressed PSD a client sent you ... and all of a sudden something you can't find the name of without buying a third-party app suddenly start hogging the network.

By using a halfway decent router with properly configured QoS. It isn't hard. Between running lsof locally and rflow on DD-WRT, it's easy to isolate the ports used for your various backup services. Once you have that, it's trivial to put those services at the bottom of the queue for outbound bandwidth.

What if a visitor on your network is using a new service with different ports from your standard? What if you're looking at a sync service that runs within the web browser or otherwise uses shared ports?

Or perhaps you're (shock, horror) a mainstream user who has no idea what any of the words in your comment mean, starting with "router"?

Sure, a power user can prioritise traffic and deal with this, but I think the original point is valid for the average user. Perhaps the onus should be on backup software writers (and anything that syncs in large enough chunks) to ensure their traffic is smooth and not bursty, in effect enforcing their own QoS.

If the onus is on the authors of backup software to ensure good bandwidth usage practices, then we can rule out port-sharing with real-time application protocols (and HTTPS) as an unequivocally bad practice. Even if we don't, it's still easy to de-prioritize traffic from unknown hosts or on unknown ports or on connections that have transferred too much data. (The popular and easy to use Tomato firmware makes all of that trivial to set up.)

Also, mainstream desktop users do generally know what a router is. The people who are afraid to touch the boxes the cable guy installed and think that IE is the internet are well below average in terms of computer literacy.

Finally, backup software can't ensure that it is well behaved unless at some point it tries to estimate the quality of your connection (which is hard to do accurately), and even then it can't be well-behaved if it is used on more than one machine simultaneously.

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