Thread: Setting up a backup / mirror server

Anyone ever setup a backup or mirror server of your main dedicated server?
I am looking into picking up another server to use for backing up either entire servers, or simply for my main sites should my other servers go down.

Something simple to install would be nice

If you run cpanel on linux machines you can simply setup a cron job to do a full site backup and then get the site to ftp it to a server of your choice, simply supply the log in details within the cron job.

Thats the simplest way I can think of.

thanks
jojo

Originally Posted by jojo

If you run cpanel on linux machines you can simply setup a cron job to do a full site backup and then get the site to ftp it to a server of your choice, simply supply the log in details within the cron job.

Thats the simplest way I can think of.

thanks
jojo

If you're using CPanel and you have full control (ie. you have access to WHM), don't waste your time with a custom cron script. WHM will do nightly backups to a remote server, lookup under the Backup section in WHM. But this is just backups.

But, if you're not using WHM/CPanel, and/or you want a live/hot mirror this is where you could create a script that does backups. Use ssh-key's and rsync. You could have the rsync script run multiple times per day.

If you have your ssh-keys setup here is a simple one liner to do a backup

rsync -ave ssh --delete server1.mydomain.com:/home server2.mydomain.com:/home

This will sync all of /home from server1 to server2. Any new or changed files will be copied over, any deleted files will be removed.

If you need any further help, let me know. I do a ton of linux scripting.

Thanks for the info. I am still looking into options.

I could go with a load balanced setup, that however keeps all the machines in one local. I want a live backup in a different data center should the data center go down, go slow, etc.

In talks with one company about setting a dedicated server up for this. also debating picking up another server just for backups and fiddling around for testing

If you are talking about complete failover at a remote datacenter, be prepared to spend A LOT of money. Your bandwidth and cpu will be out the roof on both servers. A remote backup merely for backing up files would be your best option or failover at the same datacenter