backup problem

[jur]

Hello,

We have a customer on his own dedicated direct admin server.
On this server he has created a new admin user and a number of regular users, no resellers. Because of the heavy load on this server we are going to implement load balancing. Because of this we are going to install a second server that is exactly the same as the original one.

Here is the problem:
Because his sites are so big (a couple of TB in total) we want to backup the users on the original machine without the actual content of the home directories. In other words, we want to be able to restore a backup on the new machine that only restores useraccounts, domain information, databases etc.
This is because there is not enough room on the original machine to store the backup.
Once this is done we are going to synchronise the actal content using Rsync.

Is this possible? and if so, how?

Thanks in advance for any advice you guys can give me.

 

[DavidJacobs]

Hi Jur,

I see there is no reply in here yet for you, I am actually looking for a similar solution, not for laodbalancing, but just to have a exact same server as hot standby, so I can activate it as soon as the original might crash. I own two DA licenses so both machines are currently up and running (one has a main IP + +- 20 site-ips, the other only has one IP and should get the site IP's in case the original fails.

How should I make sure all user data etc is copied?
Is there a Rsync script available to also sync userdate (in case a new user is created on only the main server), or should I just rsync the /home data and create users by hand (risking different UID's... )

 

[nobaloney]

Look at the System Backup option; it may work for you. If it doesn't (it doesn't work with rsync for example, or you may not have enough space to use it) it may give you some ideas; at least it will give you an idea of what needs to be backed up.

The System Backup option requires at least as much spare space on the drive as your largest path from /home.

For example, do:

# du -sh /home/*

to get a list of how much space each path from /home takes up.

Jeff