Web Server Backup

[Ripples]

I'm operating a hosted dedicated server remotely, and have just had a boot drive failure.

Can anyone advise whether there is a software solution that provides good didk to disk backup?

Ideally is it possible to mirror drive C: onto drive D: and have NT boot from an alternative drive if Drive C: fails?

Ths server is not networked, currently does not use SQL Server but we're hoping to install that in the next few months.

Any help and advice would be really appreciated.

Thanks
Peter

 

[tschuy]

I have mirrored my primary drives through a Hardware Raid controller very successfullly and it had even "saved" me a time or two. But if this is not a possible solution and are force to use NT's software mirror solution (all though not good because it does zap some processor resources) doing so will still work but you will have no redundancy to keep the server running if the Primary drive fails. But you will have another clone ready to go and all you would have to do is modify the boot.ini file to point to the good HD. Create an NT boot disk which has the essential startup files on it that will get your system up and running by having the boot.ini pointing to the second HD which served as the mirrored spare. This will get the server running again. Go to disk manager and rebuild the mirror (after you have replaced the bad drive). Once that is done shut down the server and restart it normally. I had to do this once and again because of training and fore thought ,it "saved" me. But in reality the only real way to go is to have a hardware raid controller with two drives mirrored. If one fails NT won't even know until you check the logs or the Raid controller lets you know. Nice thing is that the server will still continue to run and give you the time to swap out the bad drive and restore. Not when you have 50+ plus people mad at you because they can't logon or get access to the server. Question is which is cheaper in the long run. To me the $500 for a decent Raid card was and is cheaper.

Hope this helps.

Tim Schuy

 

[Ripples]

Tim,

Many thanks for the response.

My biggest problem is that I'm operating this server remotely. This is a dedicated server that I rent from Digital Nation, and I'm located in the middle of the Caribbean and have to rely on PCAnywhere or Telnet down a very skinny and expensive phone line.

As with most dedicated rentals, all they supply is the bare box at $1000 per month for the hardware, NT/IIS/PCAnywhere. It's up to me to buy and control the software, and of course re-instate it every time there's a failure.

I've had 2 failures in the past 30 days - 1 boot disk failed and the other was caused by Cold Fusion overloading the registry with excessive client information.

A RAID variant of this machine puts it close to the $2000 per month, which is well out of my budget. But I don't mind spending good bucks if only I could find a software option that I can control through PCAnywhere.

Best wishes
Peter