# I finally fixed my server issues, now what?



## hockey97 (Aug 10, 2014)

Hi, I just finally fixed all my server issues that happened  in May of this year.  I have a working server. However, I still have some major errors in the background. I will work on those but for right now plan on doing a backup.

So, my question here is: what setup should I have to minimize the hassle when upgrading or downgrading? I want to spend as little time as possible when upgrading my systems. 

I was told instead of upgrading it's always best to just install from scratch. The problem is that if I have to do this myself it can take months to get back to where it originally was. I don't want to be spending months to get the system back up and running.  I was told that I should just save the configuration files for all server software. Then just do a fresh install and it should still work when you put back the files. 

I just want to know what's the best method when backing up a system. Should you backup the whole hard drive? Or should you just focus on the software configuration files and folders that contain storage or files stored that are important?

For instance like the Apache web server. Should I backup just the configuration files and the actual folders that contain the website files? 

So, would that not be good enough? I don't want to run into a situation where  I do the above: backup the *A*pache server configuration files and server folders, then do a clean install for the server and then install *A*pache's newer version and replace the configuration files and the directories that contained websites. This situation might not work because of changes in the software like modules installed that are needed.

What is the best method and what do places like datacenters do in such a situation? For instance, my university always has a maintenance of the server for just  five hours every sunday night.  They would give a notice to major upgrades, they would normally schedule the changes for two days. They  would always take just two days for major upgrades. Yet, while doing this their servers are still up. It's just that some functionality is disabled. 

However, what would web hosting providers do? I mean if I own a business websites need to be up 24/7. How do the web hosting companies handle this when they need to keep their systems up to date without any issues?


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## SirDice (Aug 11, 2014)

hockey97 said:
			
		

> However, what would web hosting providers do? I mean if I own a business websites need to be up 24/7. How do the web hosting companies handle this when they need to keep their systems up to date without any issues?


That's simple. They have multiple machines. That way you can take one off-line to do maintenance while the service itself keeps running.


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## hockey97 (Aug 13, 2014)

SirDice said:
			
		

> hockey97 said:
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So, would that be using clustering? How would you setup such a system?


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## junovitch@ (Aug 13, 2014)

There's not really a "quick reply" to answer that question.  It really depends on the complexity of the service(s) being offered.  For web, it could be as simple as two web servers with a round robin style DNS letting the client connect to either one.  For more complex setups, it might be reverse proxies handing requests out to a farm of backend services with some intelligence to send requests to the ones that aren't undergoing maintenance and have the least users.  That doesn't even include the bit about redundancy for backend databases.  For some services, tools like CARP can be used to present one address to clients and the service supports failover between the systems.


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