Recovering Server over itself with newer Backup - Is this weird? Best practice?
Hello
I'm pretty new to all of this for our company, so please bear with me. I think maybe it's best to just start with a description of what we are trying to do and then what we have tried and get some feedback on that.
We previously had 2 Servers up and running ("Old" and "New") while we transitioned our software from Old to New. We hit the point where we no longer need Old running, so we would like that to be ready to Recover the most recent backup if New server goes down. We are using Cyber Back-up 12.5 Advanced. In testing, I have been able to successfully recover New to Old using the Bootable Media. The first problem there is that it takes 1 Day, 19 Hours to recover. That would be fine if I just needed to do that Full Recovery this one time and any other Recoveries from here out would just basically update it to the most recent image.
The next issue is that because this is a copy of our main server and our Domain Controller, I don't want to let it get on the network while the New/active server is up. The idea is that we only need Old Server Recovered when New Server is already down and off the network. This makes testing it a little bit harder, since I can't just use the Backups we have on network storage.
The week after the first recovery was successul, I Exported the new most-recent full backup to an external drive (6 hours) and tried to recover from that, hoping that we could do some kind of Update Recovery instead of recovering the whole thing. I first tried using the Acronis that was ("still") installed to recover, but it was acting weird and then I read what seems to be advice against recovering over itself in that fashion anyways.
Which leaves me with recovering from the Bootable Media again, hoping that somewhere along the line, it would notice I was recovering what is mostly the same thing and only recover the "new" stuff, but, understandably, all I did was do a Full Recovery again over everything, which took 1 Day, 18 Hours.
Long story short, the target scenario is:
- Do one full most-recent Recovery of New Server to Old Server (Which is what happened this weekend)
- Let Old Server sit until we need it because New Server goes down
- Recover whatever is now the most-recent New Server Backup to the Old Server, ideally faster than 6 hours of exporting Backup to external drive and then 1 Day, 18 Hours of Recovery.
Is this scenario even feasible? Am I missing an option along the way or am I completely off-base with our expectations here? Thank you for any advice you can give.
Andrew
