Allen Kinsel - SQL DBA

SQL Server, PASS, and other data mishaps

How do you do Disaster Recovery

By Allen Kinsel, 6 months and 3 days ago

Going through the process of a large scale multi-location disaster recovery made me stop and think about all the different incarnations that can be used to recover database servers. 

Living with a datacenter in Hurricane alley, We've been doing disaster preparedness(recovery) on a small scale for many years but this year we've been working towards recovering all of our assets to an offsite colocation.  That part of the decision is easy, the actual method used to do these recoveries is definitely up in the air and I fully expect our processes to change for the better, every time we redo our disaster testing (many times a year going forward).

In exploring the recovery process we quickly realized that our «hardware failure» recovery documents weren't going to work effectively in a datacenter failure situation.  So, it was time to design a new set of criteria for success.  I thought Id share our thought process and how we plan on tackling this always fun experience.  Its worth mentioning in a side note that no SQL replication is wanted/allowed for in our case.

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