OT : Disaster recovery?

[Ken A]

Colocation Colocation wrote:
> So I've just spent the past 3 weeks setting up and tweaking my Mailscanner
> installation. I've done every possible tweak and gone through everything
> with a magnifying glass and it all looks great.

wait 3 weeks. repeat. :-)

> So now my thoughts turn to backups. How best should i protect my 
> investment?
> I cannot yet justify a second box for redundancy so if all goes wrong i 
> will
> need to be able to quickly get my mail server back online.
> 
> I'm considering taking one of my raid mirrors out and rebuilding the array
> online. That way i will have a spare incase it all goes wrong.... however
> there are alot of drawbacks to this.
> 
> My server is equipped with lights out management so really what i want 
> to do
> is a "bare metal" type backup, that way if anything does go wrong and i
> happen to be holiday i will still be able to fix it.
> 
> Dream Scenario : uh oh for x reason my server has totally died and all data
> is lost. I ssh in, boot off my already connected USB key and reinstall the
> operating system. (or some kind of restore software?) I then pull my backup
> from my ISP's san storage and begin the restore. Two hours later my server
> is back online and serving mail as it should be!
> 
> Any thoughts? Or am i living in cuckoo land?
> 

That's great as long as it dies from something software related. 
Hardware dies too though. If that happens, on a low budget, your ISP may 
have a relatively inexpensive virtual box loaded with something useful 
that can take over for a while, provided you have backed up all your 
software configs & tweaks, needed src files and have them on your laptop 
while you are sitting on the beach. Don't count on your ISP's backup, 
unless you've tested it a few times and really trust it.

Ken A.
Pacific.Net