How to distribute backup load by some time range?

[Kenya-West]

I have 15 hosts happily backuping to two home laptops exposed to Internet by proxy.

The problem is all hosts start backup by cron timers both defined in autorestic.yml (every 2 hours) and host's cron (every 5 minutes). So, the hosts backup every 2 hours. They all start to backup at one moment, since they share the same timers. This leads to big peak load to my laptops that have very old Celeron CPUs, DDR2 and 15 y. o. HDDs.

I do not want all hosts to backup at one time. And I do not want to manually tweak theirs configs.

One solution is to implement random seed when starting backup process in config level or cron level.

Any ideas?

[Kenya-West]

Solution:

sudo crontab -e

then write something like this:

#Ansible: Autorestic backup
*/30 * * * * /bin/bash -c 'sleep $((RANDOM\%300))' && /home/kenyawest/backup-restic-node/autorestic/scripts/update-cron.sh

- in each host. This job delays script execution in range of 5 minutes.

I do this through Ansible, so it manages cron jobs instead of me.