header image
 

Po-Man’s Web Server Backups

I have two webservers. I took a bunch of old PC parts and built two servers. Both will host my website, but one server will be 184 miles away in central Louisiana. The problem I was going to face was backing up my server data multiple times daily in order to ensure that a server failure at my main site (New Orleans, La) would not take my website down.

Blaize told me about Cobiam Backup. At first I was skeptical. I’ve used backup clients before and never had much success with em OR they weren’t reliable enough to justify spending money to purchase the program. So I tried it out and literally from install to active backups was about 10 minutes. Cobian Backup is that easy.

So, to show you how I replicate my servers every 4 hours to ensure nearly %100 uptime I am going to demonstrate the replication of my network status .html file (which is offline right now, go figure). Before I begin I want to give you a quick run down of the equipment I am using:

  • 2 custom built servers. One 800 Mhz AMD with 256mb RAM and one Intel P4 1.7ghz with 256mb RAM both with 120 GB hard drive partitioned in half; C: main and D: webserver.
  • Both are running Apache installed using Xampp (not light)
  • Both are running Server 2003 Standard Edition (you can get 180 day trials on ebay and in Windows Server 2003 study books)
  • Both on are the same LAN. Actually one server (the main P4) is on the LAN and the backup (AMD) is connected via a PPTP VPN Tunnel through my Watchguard Firebox

    Once I configured my Apache install, I shared the htdocs folder on both servers. I mapped both shared folders on either server.

    Next I downloaded and installed Cobiam Backup. Once running, I selected task from the top menu and created new task. I appropriately named this “Webserver Backup”. Go through the settings on this page and select the ones that best tailor to you. For me this involved not making an archive copy and increasing the time between backups to 4 hours (60 minutes x 4 hours).

    Add both your source directory and destination directory. I exploded my source (top left) so you can see how the navigation is laid out for the Xampp install when selecting the source folder as well as the destination (bottom right).

    Once both my directories were added I had both a Local Source directory for the main install of Apache from which I would be pulling the backup and the destination Mapped Drive where I would be putting my backed up files.

    NOTE: I had to rename my destination directory and remove the “htdocs” after the 10.101.10.103 otherwise I would have the correct parent “htdocs” folder (where my backup server would pull from) and a child “htdocs” folder where the correct backups would reside. Of course this would not work as my directory would look something like D:\xampp\htdocs\htdocs . This could have been easily corrected with a different mapped drive scheme (or if a dummy wouldn’t have set this up, aka: me).

    Once I got the task added and tweaked, I opened both my source and destination. You can see that the source contains the “boss.html” file which generates the Advanced Host Monitor network status report and the destination which contains… nothing.

    I manually ran my scheduled task and we have a success! You can see in the background my backup webserver now contains the 1 changed file from the host.

    Once I get my blogged moved over I will start replicating this over the VPN. :) I hope you enjoyed my little demonstration.

    ~ by johndball on November 17, 2007.

    • Leave a Reply