Timeshift (rsync) makes system unusable due to hdd bottleneck

I am going to try to make this quick. I have been using Linux Mint for a couple years and the latest release (18.3) now ships with an app called Timeshift, which is basically a gui for rsync, for making images of your system automatically. As I have been trying to make more backups of my systems I have been trying to use it for the last month or so.
Here is the problem, whenever Timeshift makes a new snapshot of my local hdd, it completely locks up my system because rsync takes over all hdd bandwidth. My running theory as to why its so bad is that the rsync process (timeshift) runs under the root user and as a result supersedes all other local user requests, aka me just trying to browse the web. My question is, is there any way to decrease the priority of certain processes before they are started, aka always set the priority for the rsync command to “low” because I don’t really care if the backup takes an extra hour, i would much rather not have to reset my machine or have to wait 30mins for the snapshot to finish.

your best bet would just be to use ionice
https://linux.die.net/man/1/ionice

so for example you would probably do the following

ionice -c 2 -n 4 timeshift

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Which will slow down timeshift / rsync, but that’s probably ok.

Does timeshift integrate with lvm?

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not sure, but i want to say yes as it was a feature that was held-off because of btrfs and lvm support

thanks for the reply I will try it out :grinning::+1:

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