Dear Lee and all those who will find this useful,
Thank you ever so much Lee for your advice, my method was a little different to the ways you hyperlinked to in your last post. However the essence of my problem was HTTP aliases as you mentioned. Everything has worked fine and I have been able to setup a backup of my site which is completely separate from the original in terms of the hosting space folder and the MS SQL database. I've tested them both and any changes made to one does not affect the other.
I can't quite explain the delight knowing that I can now restore from a backup. Although I will be careful with what I do in DNN it reduces my paranoia that I will cause a critical error in the install and be unable to restore from backup.
To say thankyou please see below the step-by-step procedures I went through to create my backup. This was done with a working original website, not one that had crashed. I use Ultima Hosts as a host server with an MS SQL 2005 database. Feel free to link to this post for future backup queries.
Add new portal alias (with the subdomain you're going to create for the backup) to the current website
Backup MS SQL database and the space folder containing your DNN files
You can't copy a folder and paste it in the same folder level with dotnetpanel(because dotnetpanel doesn't Create a folder called 'copy of
') so paste your copy inside a dummy folder. Rename the dummy folder with the same name as your subdirectory(e.g. www.backup.guchusum.org)
Now you've made a copy of the database and space folder, remove the portal alias you added to the current website(else you might end up navigating to the current website when you later type in backup.guchusum.org)
Create a new subdomain pointing to the copied space folder you just created. Ensure write permissions and directory browsing are ticked.
Create a new MSSQL 2005 database with a different database name, but with the same user and password as the current database
Restore from the database backup to the newly created database.
Change web.config in your copied space folder. Keep the install date and all other settings the same. Just change the 2 lines of connection string in and .
Now in a browser go to www.backup.guchusum.org.
Login as host in the backup version and remove the original http alias of www.guchusum.org.
Now make a small textual change on the backup home page and using a different browser like Opera or MSIE see if the public sees the difference in www.backup.guchusum.org. Then see if the change is mirrored in www.guchusum.org, it shouldn't be! You can also do the same test but vice-versa, making a change in the original website. Do these tests with the internet cache cleared Temp Int files in MSIE and if you've got the Fasterfox extension in Firefox then it's a right click on the page timer.
When I was happy that I succeeded I changed the subdomain pointer of www.backup.guchusum.org back to my home site, in case a searchbot or a human accidentally starts viewing the old content of the backup version since I won't be updating it. I can always use it as a quick solution if my actual website fails.