What does backupmng actually DO? And where the hell is /USR/SBIN/CRON?

[ForceRegistered]

Good day. I have a VPS that's running Virtuozzo and Plesk 8.6.0. Normal load average is between 0.00 and 0.35. Now, every once in a while, four /USR/SBIN/CRON processes will show up and catapult the load up to at least 4.00, sometimes even past 6.00, grinding the server to a halt.

Now, I realize what the awstats cron is for, but I have yet to find any reasonable explanation of the backupmng cron - according to this post, backupmng merely checks if a backup is necessary, and invokes pleskbackup if necessary. According to the documentation, backupmng "initiates scheduled backing up of domains once every 30 minutes". Now, the thing is, I have yet to see any automated backup of anything on my VPS. I don't know if it simply doesn't work, or if the backups are hidden deeeeeep in the file system, but I don't know of any automated backups on my system. I usually back my system up manually through Virtuozzo -> Maintenance, and that works fine.

Which leads me to the following questions:
a) What does backupmng actually do? What purpose does it have? What do I need it for that's so important that it needs to fully occupy my server for minutes at a time?
b) Is it safe to lower the frequency of it running to, say, daily?
c) If I determine it does nothing for me, can I disable it, or will that have some mysterious side-effects on Plesk? (Not like that would ever happen with Plesk >_>)

And a secondary question to this is: wth is "/USR/SBIN/CRON"? Linux has is a case sensitive file system - there's a beautiful /usr/sbin/cron on my system, but definitely no "/USR/SBIN/CRON" - so how the hell does that even execute? -_^

 

[servertechs]

backup manager is for manging backup of your sites files , database and mails . you can set the cron. that way you can backup your entire domains at the specific time and day you need. these way you can setup automated backups.

 

[ForceRegistered]

That is what I assumed the intention to be from the documentation line....but as said, so far, I haven't seen any backups, I have no info on how to manage the backup manager, where the backups would end up, and why it executes with an incorrect (yet mysteriously working) path to cron.

I gather from your post, though, that I can schedule it at will - thank you.