Changing Servers Due to Catastrophic H/W Event

[dcr_Moes]

I have a MAIN and a BACKUP server set up for our restaurant. The two boxes are almost identical hardware. The objective in having two is that if there is a hardware failure on the MAIN box, the BACKUP can be used to get things back up and running fairly quickly. The MAIN does "hot backups" every 5 minutes of the database file to an external USB drive (which is what would be utilized by the BACKUP).

I plan on installing POS Pizza v9 on both boxes and have the dongle attached to the box actively running the POS Pizza server.

I'd like to know if the following procedure would work for getting the BACKUP running.
1) Remove the dongle from the MAIN and attach it to the BACKUP
2) Remove the USB drive from the MAIN and attach it to the BACKUP
3) Utilizing the DB Server Admin Tool, make sure on the BACKUP that the server is NOT running and NOT installed (should be the case anyway)
(*** This next step is one that I want to get verification that it works. ***)
4) Update the dongle license on the BACKUP
5) Restore the database from the USB drive database file
6) Install the server on the BACKUP
7) Start the server on the BACKUP

The POS clients would then need to be configured to use the BACKUP server.

Does that sound like a workable game plan?

[Scott]

Step 4 is not needed, since once a dongle is activated, it remains activated forever. They only ship in a deactivated state.

One suggestion however would be to possibly use a remote SSD drive instead of a USB flash drive. They are generally more reliable. An off-site backup would be an even better option. Then all you'd need to do is fire up the backup machine, download the backup, move the dongle and install/start the server app.

One more thing to keep in mind. If your server fails to start on the backup machine, you will need to edit the server configuration, and change the very first line for the new server's name or IP. To access this field the server will need to be in a "not installed" state.

Scott

[dcr_Moes]

Thanks Scott. Good suggestions all around.

I wasn't quite sure how the dongle interfaced with a server but now I know and that makes life a bit easier.

My current backup drive is an external SSD connected via USB port so I think I'm good there. I may look into doing the cloud backup or possibly sending the backup file to the BACKUP server directly.

This is a work in progress but there is no big hurry getting things in place.

Appreciate your input and guidance!

Chris

[dcr_Moes]

As I approach the point of making the switchover (new hardware) and upgrade (v8.7 to v9.2) I have another question...when I do the activation of v9.2 on the dongle on the new hardware, will the dongle still work on my old hardware with the v8.7 software? i.e. If I needed to fall back to the old system will it still run v8.7 if I move the dongle back there...or will activating the dongle for v9.2 make it no longer work on the v8.7 hardware? I'm thinking about what happens if I end up not being able to get v9.2 working. (I know, I just should bite the bullet and sweat through it...)

[Scott]

when I do the activation of v9.2 on the dongle on the new hardware, will the dongle still work on my old hardware with the v8.7 software?

Yes, during the dongle update you are adding a v9 license to the previous license. The dongle will continue to work with previous version of the POS as well as working with the new version.


Scott

[dcr_Moes]

Successful migration to new server hardware and v9.2 completed!

Thanks for your timely assistance Scott!