Disaster Recovery Rehearsal

So I’ve spent the whole weekend performing our DR plan and there are a bunch of things to learn from the whole experience. I will be posting a more in depth look at the process and its floors over the coming week, however I thought I would quickly cap a couple of the issues I encountered.

- When restoring a full system to dissimilar hardware via Backup Exec, the only reasonable option is to use the Intelligent Disaster Recovery boot disk. Its almost impossible to restore the system in a timely fashion by rebuilding the machine and restoring data and services.

- The MS Exchange info store isn’t restored with IDR. You need to create a dummy store and restore the mail into that.

- Restoring Exchange takes for ever! Plan to sit and wait 10 hours for a small-ish info store to be recovered.

- Multiple issues with Symantec products after the restore was complete. As ridiculous as it sounds, restoring from an IDR doesn’t restore Backup Exec or any of the Symantec products. You need to manually remove the installation files and reg-keys and do a new install.

I will be covering the above points more closely in my follow up posts. Watch this space.