Need a Modest yet Thorough Backup solution

[methnen]

Hello,

I’m running a modest OS X panther server. Everything on the server is working wonderfully and I’m very happy with it. My concern is that now that I’ve gone through all of this work to set things up perfectly I want to be able to make a regular backup in case of a disaster. I’m very new to servers so I’m unsure of what is possible.

With my home setup I simply do a complete clone of my drive every night.

I would prefer a solution along these lines since in the event something when wrong I would simply have to restore from the clone and everything would be good again.

My question is, “Is this possible?” Is there anything that will get corrupted on the backup because of the nature of a server?

I’m running DNS, Mail (IMAP), APACHE, PHP, and MYSQL

Thank you for any ideas, advice, or help.

Jamie

[wallyg]

I run a couple of OS X servers and when I had Panther server on the boxes, I took them downonce a month and ran CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) to dupe the boot drive to another drive in the XServe unit (making the backup clone bootable). Worked fine.

When I upgraded one of the boxes to Tiger the upgrade made a real mess of things (I had a defective 2nd CD in the 3 disk set I rec’d via Software Update plan)…thought I was hosed until I pulled out the CCC’d copy from a week earlier, pulled out the boot drive my failed upgrade had just trashed, moved the CCC’d copy over to the first slot and press the on/off switch…up came my panther server…wondering I guess where it had lost a week but otherwise just fine.

For tiger, it’s a bit more trouble since CCC hasn’t put out a version verified for Tiger.

Oh, I run DSpace and Postgres and Apache on the server that I restored via a clone so that sounds a bit like your setup.

[methnen]

Thanks for the reply.

One question. Do you have to turn all of the services off in order to make the clone? Will doing a clone while services are running cause a problem?

Jamie

[AaronAdams]

I wrote a quick little ditty on my own site about how to use command line ASR or Disk Utility to clone drives. Check it out, it may be useful to you.

[methnen]

Josh,

I’m actually on 10.3 still with no plan to move anytime soon since the server as it is does everything I need it to and is running quite smoothly. So a 10.3 article is not a problem. I was mainly worried about dynamic content getting corrupted during a backup. My entire list of sites is run off of the mySQL database so the sites would basically have to go down if I needed to turn off mySQL and apache in order to do a backup. Turning off mail would not be an issue as I already have backup mail services to handle situations like that. So could I leave mySQL on when doing a backup or would I be inviting a disaster?

Aaron, thanks for the link. I’ll check it out.

Jamie

[Author]

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