Daily synchronizing

[zimmerj]

Hi,

We currently have 2 servers we use for hosting. Both have WHM / Cpanel installed on them. One is the production server and the second is a backup server. I want to keep the backup server up to date by synchronizing it with the production server every day at midnight. I was just going to use the backup feature in WHM to ftp the complete backup to the backup server. However I would need to run a complete backup of the entire server as incremental backup does not work via ftp. I am trying to preserve bandwidth as the backup server we use has a limited amount. The reason I want to do this is to have as close to a mirror image of the production server available in case of an outage where I cannot transfer any information from it. The second server is always online however DNS is disabled until it needs to be used in production. The most important aspect would be email messages as a lot of clients use webmail. Thanks for any ideas or help from someone who has done this before.

 

[zimmerj]

no advise I just would like other people's opinions even if they haven't done this before.

 

[webignition]

I can't offer you a direct implementation as I've never done it, however I'd recommend using the rsync tool for this, which would be a decent way of minimising bandwidth usage:

The rsync remote-update protocol allows rsync to transfer just the differences between two sets of files across the network connection, using an efficient checksum-search algorithm described in the technical report that accompanies this package.

Of course you'd have to find out what files need to be copied from server A to server B so that, as far as the operation of cPanel is concerned, server B is an exact copy of server A (i.e. all the niggly config files and so forth).

You'd also have to consider how to sync server A with server B if server B was being used due to server A being down.

Try googling secure rsync for loads of useful info in the topic.

 

[lloyd_tennison]

See this link as a start.

http://forum.ev1servers.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=38797

Just change the rsync to be server to server instead of local.

 

[Lyttek]

Another thread that's been going well is using a combination of rsync with the built-in backup in cPanel. All the benefits of full backups with the bandwidth of incrementals.

rsync friendly backups

Also, there are instructions for automating the rsync process between servers.