Webmaster Forum / ColdFusion / Advanced Techniques / November 2007

What version of CF are you using? You could look into creating a .ear or .war
file from the CF Admin. It's under "Packaging & Deployment" and then "J2EE
Archives" (in CFMX 7).

For the Scheduled tasks I'm not sure if they are captured in this file or not,
they may be in a separate XML file. I usually keep a back up of the entire
cfusionmx7 folder every now and then too. For chits and giggles, if you have an
extra system kicking around practice restoring your setup. You can work out
kinks ahead of time.

Any server you run should have a regular full image backup done for disaster
recovery.

When you first start a server, you shuld make a full drive image of all system
drives before releasing it to the public.

When you do scheduled upgrades of the OS or App Servers, you should make a
full drive image of all syste drives before releasing it to the public.

Backup the sites on a regular schedule as well, but that does not need to be a
drive image and can just be a standard backup to tape, remote drive, etc.

If you follow this, the worst that can happen is you have to replace the drive
and restore the system image(s), then restore the sites. A much better option
to completely rebuilding the systems from scratch and then explaining why the
sites are gone.

agreed, this is not a public server however and i have another server that will
be running the same OS and CF version, etc. i was just wondering if there is a
way to simply back up the CF configs and copy them to a new server or CF
install...

but since you brought it up, what is the best way to create a disk image for
windows  machines? i know there are a few methods, but i have not had much luck
with the volume shadow copy.

thanks much...

I use a product called R-DriveImage by R-Tools Technology. The image can be
done from within Windows or via a Linux kernel that loads from CD on boot up.
the latter is good for disaster recovery since then you can put in a new drive
and boot the CD to replace the system drive.

R-DriveImage also lets you load the backup archive file as a virtual drive
just to pull specific files if you want too ... no need to restore the whole
image if not required.

http://www.drive-image.com/

GhostImage (?) by Symantec is pretty good I hear too.

There are higher level Enterprise applications too, but they come with related
costs that most smaller companies can not afford.

If you are on CFMX or higher, you can create .car files with most all CF Admin config info.  Here's a step-by-step for 6.1:

http://www.quackit.com/coldfusion/coldfusion_archive_and_deploy.cfm