Datacenter failure, can you get your backups?

What a datacenter outage does to your backups

Fire, flood, a long power failure, a ransomware attack or a cloud region going dark can take a whole datacenter offline at once. If your SQL Server backups sit on the same storage, in the same rack or in the same building as the databases, they are gone with it, and the restore you were counting on never starts.

Downtime is expensive, but the data loss is permanent. The only questions that matter on that day are where the most recent copy of each backup is, and how fast you can turn it back into a working database.

How to recover when the datacenter is gone

1. Work out what is affected: which servers, databases and backup sets, and which of them have copies elsewhere.
2. Restore from the offsite or cloud copy: full, then differential, then transaction log backups to the point in time you need.
3. Fail over or rebuild: bring the restored databases up on standby or new hardware, re-point applications, and record what the recovery actually took.

Each step is faster when it has been rehearsed. The recovery is the same whether you lost one server or the whole room; the difference is how much of it you scripted in advance.

Test the restore before you need it

Backups you have never restored are a hope, not a plan. Walk through this list for every production SQL Server:

• Backups are stored away from the datacenter (offsite or another cloud region)
• Restores are tested on a schedule, not assumed
• Backup files are encrypted and access is logged
• Recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO and RPO) are written down and agreed
• Restore scripts are ready and someone other than you can run them

Watch: what the course covers

Steve Stedman walks through the course: RTO and RPO, full, differential and log backups, restoring, backup to Azure and backup performance.

Regular backups, a tested restore and a written disaster recovery plan are what stand between a bad day and a lost business. If you want to build all three, with scripts you can take back to work, the course below is where to start.