What to do when A Disaster Happens
It's a fact of life—disasters happen. Think about this scenario:
Let's assume a catastrophe happens and the river next to your office rises and floods your office building. Not only is your carpet ruined, but your primary server has spent hours below murky flood waters. Your server is a completely loss— a year's worth of your company's data has been wiped out.
Lucky for you, you made a full backup of everything on your hard drive, so all you need to do is retrieve the backups and restore them, right? It should be easy to get things back up and running again, but it may be more difficult than you think.
If the server you are restoring to is exactly the same as the server that you watched get carried downstream in the flood, you can be back in business with relative ease. If you don't have the same exact server, it may be a little more difficult.
To restore your archives to a new server, you'll need to do bare metal restore (BMR), which is the process of reformatting a computer from scratch. A bare metal restore is not the same as a simple file restore, and you have no way of knowing how long or how complicated it is going to be to replace and restore onto a different hardware until you are in the midst of doing so. The process involves reinstalling the operating system and software applications and then, restoring data and settings.
This works well if you have an identical server to restore to, but who keeps a spare server around in case of an emergency?
In the event that you need to restore your backups to a new and different server, you need a solution that can restore to dissimilar hardware. Several backup solutions offer the ability to do a bare metal restore to different or dissimilar hardware. Restoring to dissimilar hardware requires injecting the new system's drivers and then restoring the backup on the new foundation. Without the ability to restore to dissimilar hardware, your backups may be worthless.
As a word of caution, no matter what your backup strategy and solution you adopt, you need to test it out in advance. You want to make absolutely sure that when disaster strikes, you know what steps need to be taken to restore your systems and data. Identify any loopholes in your backup that will prevent it from restoring your data reliably—before a disaster strikes.
You also want to check your backup storage to make sure that your backup is viable. If you back up corrupted data, the only thing you are going to restore is corrupted data.
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