Server or client - what is faster?

[gurkan]

@TorstenC

If you have the choice to either
a) do the backups centrally one after the other from the server e.g., via CIFS/SMB or
b) set up individual cron jobs (Linux) or tasks in the task scheduler (Windows) on each client
then I don’t know - except maybe the speed - any advantage that would speak for b), hence the question.

I think I was the victim of terminology (e.g. server-host-backend). But yes, the client side backups will be more efficient / faster, given the caching is not disabled.
I run restic on ~4k clients directly. Some points I’d like to note would be:

• If they all use same repo, and that repo gets too big, total cache size on your clients might be visible.
• The wrapper / cron on client side should be somewhat clever, so they should be not crying too bad when they can’t perform backup while you’re doing maintenance on repo (e.g. check/forget/prune). At least until something like non-locking check/prune lands (if it ever does).