How do I setup a mirror server? - HTML Forums

gibby · 05-08-2009, 01:35 PM

Hello,

We have a server in our office network which hosts websites and a MySQL database, and I want to set it up so that it makes back ups of the websites and the database onto a mirror server regularly (maybe once an hour or so). I talked to my boss about it and he'd prefer to keep everything in-house. So I need to know if it's possible to do this with another computer in the office network, preferably mine.

I would like to know:

1) How to setup the server to regularly back up the websites and the database onto my computer.

2) Can this be done even though my computer runs XP.

3) Can I create a folder on my computer that the server thinks is the C:\ drive (or is that necessary)?

Thanks for your help.

Paul · 05-08-2009, 03:41 PM

What operating system is your server? What kind of web server are you using (IIS, apache, etc...)?

Windows comes with ntbackup which is a nice free back up tool. You can create a share on your XP computer and back up everything to that computer using ntbackup and scheduled tasks. I'm not sure how to back up mySQL so I can't comment on that; I'm not sure if there are files you can simply back up (which would allow you to add those files to ntbackup) or if instead you have to use a MYSQL tool.

However, this is just a back up solution. It will not provide you with a server that will go online as soon as the other one goes offline. For that you would need to do load balancing. Network load balancing is included with windows 2000 and 2003 but it is not simple to set up:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l.../cc758834.aspx

It requires somekind of SCSI backplane that both servers are connected to. Then you have to do a fair amount of configuration.

gibby · 05-11-2009, 02:03 PM

Thanks Paul,

I'm running Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6.0.

I will look up some of your suggestions and see what works best for me. Thanks.

Igor7865 · 09-21-2009, 07:36 AM

Some tools will help you (maybe not in this case, but nevertheless):
- CRONw - CRON for Windows - to create scheduled backups;
- NTFSlinks - to create hard links to files/folders, more info is here: http://elsdoerfer.name/=ntfslink
- there are lots of shareware tools for backing up the whole drives (ex.: acronis software, norton ghost etc).
- you may search for software which allows you to mount a folder into a virtual drive.

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