I'm going to set up a couple of servers to hoste several larger communities.

I'm thinking a couple of servers with mirrored harddrives but this isn't enough since there is a chance that both harddrives on one computer can fail.

I need the backups to be very fresh, since I can't afford to loose more than like one hour of data from any site.

What do you think is a good solution? I'm thinking that I might have to set up a mirror server so that if one server fails I can just switch over to the other one.

What is common for larger sites?

I have been thinking about tape backup but a week or day old backup won't do me much good.

uhm... is the failing of 2 drives really that common? A good raid system should do fine I'd think.

No, say there was a fire in the datacenter.... You need offsite backups in a totally different datacenter IMO.

So what would be a good way except for HD to HD copies over the network?

You know any good docs to read on the subject?

I would setup another server in a nearby DC and make hourly images between the servers.

That can get expensive real fast with bandwidth. I was just pondering the same issue.

The reason I suggested raid system is that he wanted a quick changeover solution. A server in another dc would work - but just make sure you have a 3rd server running dns for the primary server.

if the primary goes down and it runs it's own dns - you have no way to get the sites pointing to the backup server quickly. Unless its just for one site - but again, not a quick change...

So the best solution would acatually to run two raided servers on two different locations in the same datacenter? This way you would still survive a fire and you won't use any bandwith for the copies?

Though two different data centers would of course be better...