Recently I had a dental checkup with less than stellar results. Usually I see the dentist every six months, but this time it had been over a year because life was busy, and other interruptions I felt were more important. This will end up costing me 20% more than if I had gone in on time.
As a result, my mind turns to my computer systems. Isn’t that how your mind works? I’m asking myself about those things we need to do frequently, but tend to put off, or ignore altogether. At the top of my list is testing backups. You put together a backup strategy. But, do you ever test if those backups can be restored? Do you ever run a restore exercise that includes going back a ways, and apply incremental and transaction log backups? No. Then how do you know it works? When it’s time to use them, it’s too late to find out there are issues.
Let’s go down a more difficult path. What about restoring in a failover situation? Denny Cherry wrote a blog on this a few years ago. What are you going to do when your whole data center is missing overnight. Yes, it does happen. A good friend of mine had the roof leak over their data center, drowning all of their servers. Can you recover from that kind of a situation? How long will it take you? How do you know how long it will take you unless you take the time to test your plan?
Call me a nag if you like. I’m just like the dentist telling you that you need to floss regularly. So, get out your IT floss, and make sure your plan is thorough. Then run an exercise to prove that it work. Finally, keep the plan up to date as you add new systems or applications.
Just because you are using the Cloud for some of your hosting does not reduce your responsibility for disaster recovery. It will change you implementation. But you still have the same goals and requirements.
Cheers,
Ben