[CentOS] Best way to backup and entire machine??

[John Plemons]

The web machine uses a PHP shopping cart running atop MySQL, all of the 
main and important information is kept as a part of the MySQL DB.  So 
the main thing I would want to mirror is the application and the DB.  
I'm a surplus dealer, so hardware isn't a big issue, I have extra 
servers that can be up in a couple of hours without any big layout of money.
I'm just looking for the best way to keep down time to a minimum and as 
always to KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid.  Simple to manage, simple to 
maintain...

John



Les Mikesell wrote:
> John Plemons wrote:
>   
>> I want to mirror a Centos box, not having done this before, I'm looking 
>> for guidance.
>>
>> What is the best way to perform this task, I have a running webserver, a 
>> single external IP address to the website, and wanted to protect myself 
>> should the server go down. My though would be a mirror of that 
>> webserver, running in background, if the main server dies, then just 
>> move the mirror in place, change the IP and go on...  Limiting down time...
>>     
>
> There are several approaches, depending on how you want to trade expense 
> and effort against possible downtime - and whether your site is 
> approaching the point where you need a load-balanced farm of servers and 
> possibly redundant sites.
>
> The easiest plan with the least to go wrong is probably to use RAID1 
> mirrored/swappable drives with a spare chassis, and also do nightly 
> backups.  The most likely failure will be a disk drive, handled 
> transparently by the mirror until you can replace it.  Next most likely 
> would be the power supply/motherboard which you handle by swapping the 
> disks to your spare with a small amount of downtime.  Next would be an 
> operator or software error that erases or corrupts your disks.  For that 
> you have to restore from your last backup with a much longer downtime.
>
> You can keep the spare server in sync with DRBD and fail over 
> automatically with heartbeat at the expense of more complexity but you 
> still need backups for the error scenaro.
>
>   
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