I have a drupal website which I am looking to duplicate. Basically, it took lots of money to hire people to install the modules and configure it and I am looking to open another stuff with the same set-up. Is it possible to do this with a back-up or something similar? And how can I go about doing this?
What you want to do is turn your Drupal folder into a Multi-site setup, that will allow you to have several websites that use the same modules and themes that are presently installed, but by adding more databases you get more websites. You don't need complete installations of Drupal over and over again, everything is shared except for files like images in your file folder and the databases. Look at the Drupal website for instructions, it is very simple to accomplish. You will need ftp and SSH access to your server so you can move around files into the new configuration and restart your web server afterwards.
If you are using Drupal to create more websites,is not a problem.If you put the same content,it is duplicate.
As long your content is original the searchengines wont bother, how this works with your visitors is a other question.
I don't know of a way to export modules AND modules settings to create a new identical site. I would do it by hand.
i done it my self... just copied everything on local host, then on LOCAL host changed titles, content,adjusted everything, URLs, LINKS, structure, menu, database, adjusted htacess, etc..... saved me a lot of time configuring modules, than upload everything on web like you will do when transeffing LOCAL to WEB... that's it...
Just create a duplicate of your site as you would moving your site to a new server (copy the files and database to the new server). The only difference is just that you keep the original and do the necessary changes on the new one (if there are actually changes you need to make).