Using SD for OXServ

[ITRodeo]

I'm sorry if this has been addressed before, I've spent the past hour and a bit looking through the forums for posts that might address my questions.

Background:
Last week my client had a OS corruption that ended up in us reinstalling the whole OXServ from scratch and rebuilding the network. Resulting in a few days of down time, I'm now determined to make sure this can not happen again(days of downtime)

My Goal:
I'm looking to create a setup that will clone the OXServ drive once a night, or maybe every 2nd night onto a 2nd drive, so incase our main drive crashes all we need to do is pull out the old drive, toss in the cloned drive and we are back on our way.

What we have:
1 OXServer, 1 Primary internal drive thats 80GB, we received today a 2nd internal 80GB drive to use as a spare.

My questions:
Would it be possible with the 2nd 80GB drive installed into the OXServ, to have our primary drive get cloned to the 2nd drive in a bootable manner?
Or would this cause a problem of sorts? (do I have to clone to a drive in an external USB bay?)
with this setup would we be able to pull out the primary drive, place the 2nd drive into that bay and then boot and continue working as if nothing has changed? or is there potential to loose data? user info? etc?

I'm sorry if these questions have been answered in the past, I wasn't able to find info in regards to my questions on the forum.

thank you for your time and support.

[dnanian]

In this case, have you considered RAID mirroring?

[ITRodeo]

I have thought about that, my concern is that RAID Mirroring will duplicate say a "undetected" corruption similar to what we suffered from last week.
It was not a failed drive issue, something in the OS broke.. we don't know what exactly and after trying all sort of fixes which none of them worked we had to reinstall the OS. but i digress..
I'm thinking that something that does a once a day copy or every 2nd day may give us just that little bit more stability. so there is not constant changes being made on it, The drive is purely for the OS, no personal user files are stored on it, those are all on another RAID setup.

[dnanian]

OK. You can certainly make a bootable copy; since it's a server, be aware that you shouldn't do this when the server is active, should shut down non-essential services, etc...

[ITRodeo]

Thank you. Having this drive plugged into the server in the 2nd bay is not an issue is it?
Or do I need to unmount the 2nd drive after every clone?
I assume I can shut down all services with some scripts that run before and after the SD cloning?
(Sorry, I'm new to the OS X admin world, learning as much as I can as fast as I can.)

[dnanian]

Yes, you can write scripts to do that, and we provide a place to call those scripts in the before/after shell script entries in the Advanced tab of Options.