I am setting up a disaster recovery strategy for two 2012 servers DB1 and DB2 in one location and may be later I plan to set them in different locations, I want DB2 to take control incase of of DB1 failure. They are installed with MySql 5.5 database application and for now DB2 has no data.
How can can I replicate and synch these two servers? and create backups from DB2?
The replication process on windows servers is similar to doing it in any other server system.
First of all I would recommend reading the official MySQL replication documentation (https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/replication.html) and then check out this similar question from a while ago. (mysql replication on windows server)
Personally I would suggest using tools that allow you to replicate data between database servers. They can save you all the messy work and even impove performance.
When I wanted to replicate my MySQL database to Amazon Redshift data warehouse (https://www.alooma.com/integrations/mysql/redshift) I used a tool called Alooma that supports several replication methods and provides a 'Near Realtime View' which allows you to query the latest snapshot of your database in your data warehouse.
