shadow copying one server to another?

[viper92086]

i want to know how you can shadow copy one server 2003 machine from another?

what i wanted to do is since server 1 is the main server to have shares p and j. i want to have server 2 to shadow copy those two shares every night. I want it so that in case of a hardware failure, i can easily setup the shares on server 2. is this at all possible? server 1 is small business 2003 and server 2 is standard 2003. server1 is relatively new and server 2 is about 5 years old. Assume i have enough storage on server 2. thanks!

 

[brandinb]

You want to use dfs replication. Shadow copy is for previous versions of files. Basically it will be an incomplete copy that will be useless without the source. Setup dfs replication and your shares will be replicate automatically. Setup dfs namespace and your shares wont go down even when you reboot one of your servers as long as you set the second server as second dns to handle resolving the dfs namespace while the primary dns is down.

 

[viper92086]

i quickly skimmed dfs and from what it sounds like is, both servers have up to date copies in real time, what i really want is say sever 2 to sync up with server1 after 1 day. (it would synchronize through the night)

 

[brandinb]

Well that is simple. You need to create a simple batch file using xcopy or robocopy. Then use task scheduler to run the script during the night. I will post an example script for you that includes logging.

echo Server network share sync operation >> "c:\documents and settings\all users\desktop\server sync.txt"
date /t >> "c:\documents and settings\all users\desktop\server sync.txt"
echo started >> "c:\documents and settings\all users\desktop\server sync.txt"
time /t >> "c:\documents and settings\all users\desktop\server sync.txt"
echo results >> "c:\documents and settings\all users\desktop\server sync.txt"
xcopy \\server1\share \\server2\share /e /c /y /o /d >> "c:\documents and settings\all users\desktop\server sync.txt"
echo finished >> "c:\documents and settings\all users\desktop\server sync.txt"
time /t >> "c:\documents and settings\all users\desktop\server sync.txt"
echo ********************************************************************************* >> "c:\documents and settings\all users\desktop\server sync.txt"

Copy all that into notepad and edit the \\server\share to your unc paths to your network shares you want copies. Then save the file as a .bat in the root c drive of whichever server you want to monitor the operation from. Then setup task scheduler to run the script at night and when the script runs it will give you a nice text file on your desktop that will show when the operation ran and what files copied across. It will add the results of each day so the txt file will essentially be a log of the operation. Let me know if that works out for ya and you can try different xcopy options so type xcopy /? in cmd prompt to see options you can set and review the options i suggested.

 

[viper92086]

awesome! thanks, i will try it out this week

 

[swatbat]

You can also use something like sync toy and schedule it via the task scheduler.

Third option would just be to run an ntbackup job and send a backup file to the other server. If the first server went down you could just restore the backup to folders on the second server and remake the shares.