Hey all,
I finally had some time to take a look at the server, and it turns out that the data corruption on the drive only affected the boot partition, not any of the important data. I've already made an on-site backup, and I'm in the process of copying it off site. It's only 8GB, but the remote site doesn't have much bandwidth, so it will probably take all night to complete.
So, if the server's not back up, you might be wondering how the site is running. I'm using a trick called chroot to simulate an environment similar to booting off of the hard drive. This allowed me to start apache, mysql, and other related things as they were when the server last shut down. This stuff is all running in-place on the original hard drive, which I transplanted in to my desktop. This isn't a permanent solution, but it will buy me the time I need to transfer the data in to a more permanent location.
My plan is to move all of this in to an Amazon EC2 instance, which will go a long way towards guaranteeing that there will be no downtime.
Topic: Temporarily back up (Read 180 times)