I am using Bacula and connecting to my cPanel server on a nightly basis at 2am to backup the tar.gz files that were generated the previous day at 6am by cPanel.
Note, cPanel is generating a full backup every morning and dumping it to a tar file on a per user basis.
With Bacula (my backup system that runs on a different server, backing up the cPanel tar balls) I run a full backup on the 1st of every month, and incremental on the rest of the remaining days (days 2 to 31).
Im finding that the incremental backups are still large (30-40% of the size of the full backup)... I know for sure there is not 30% of data being added in differences each night.
I guess because a small change to an input file in a group of files results in a very different tar.gz file, so there will be lots of changes from one file to the next even though the data may not have changed significantly for each file.
Would I be better off just syncing /home/* (all the user directories), and dumping the database on a per user basis to a file in the users directory (as a cron job)?
Anything else I should look out for with the above, or any other recommendations to maintain native cPanel tar.gz tarball restorations but keep incremental backups small?