It’s a fact of life—disasters happen. Think about this scenario:
Let’s assume the river next to your office rises and floods your building. Not only is your carpet ruined, but your primary server has spent hours below murky flood waters. Your server is a complete loss—a year’s worth of your company’s data has been wiped out.
Luckily, you made a full backup of everything on your server, so all you need to do is retrieve the backups and restore them, right? Hopefully, it will be easy to get things back up and running in no time.
But then again, it may be more difficult than you think.
To restore your archives to a new server, you now need to do what is known as a BMR, or bare metal restore, a process that involves reinstalling the operating system and software applications and then restoring the data and settings.
It is impossible to estimate how long a BMR will take. You really have no way of knowing what complications lie ahead of you until you roll up your sleeves and get to work. If the server you are restoring to is the same as the server you pulled out of the water, you may be back in business in a relatively short time. However, if the new server is not the same, there may be complications.
The reality is the latter. Technology moves ahead at a rapid pace, and you will probably end up having to restore to a different piece of hardware. You may be restoring to a SATA drive from a fiber channel drive. You may be restoring to a mother board with an entirely different set of drivers, and so on.
Bottom line, unless your backup and restore solution is specifically designed to back up to dissimilar hardware, you may have a long night ahead of you.
Restoring to dissimilar hardware is tricky because it 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 backup strategy and solution you adopt, be sure to test it out in advance. You want to make absolutely certain that when disaster strikes, you know exactly what steps are required to restore your systems and data. Identify in any loopholes that will prevent you from restoring your data reliably in advance—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.
Learn more about AppAssure backup and replication software : http://www.appassure.com/
Download a free trial software: http://go.appassure.com/free-trial?LeadSource=nonpaid_replay_trial
George Gaudi is an writer, consultant, networking engineer, and expert in the technology field. He has been in the backup and recovery field for almost 8 years.
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