I'm not completely confident in the restoration process for some of our backups. I believe I could recover the systems, but it would probably take several hours and involve a fair amount of improvisation. For those who have restored production servers, what backup infrastructure and recovery procedures do you use? How quickly can you typically restore different types of systems, and what has helped make the process reliable and repeatable?
5 Answers
The specific product matters less than having a documented runbook and testing it regularly. Pick representative systems, restore them on a schedule, record the actual recovery times, and update the documentation whenever something changes. Until you’ve performed a restore recently, you don’t really know whether the backup is usable.
Veeam has been very straightforward for us. A full virtual-machine restore to a local datastore usually takes around 10–15 minutes on fast storage and a 10Gb network, although the real time depends on the VM size, destination, and whether the restore is local or cloud-based. We also keep immutable copies and maintain a runbook for the common recovery scenarios.
The process is different depending on whether you’re backing up virtual machines or physical hosts, and whether you’re restoring a whole image, system state, or just application data.
Recovery time depends heavily on the failure. A single application server may be restored quickly, while a damaged directory environment can require rebuilding domain controllers and cleaning up metadata. A compromised system needs investigation first so you don’t restore malware or an attacker’s persistence. For ransomware, I would build a clean VM, restore only the required data disks or files from a known-good point, and avoid trusting the original operating-system image.
Separating the operating-system disk from application data makes this much easier. You can deploy a clean VM, attach the recovered data volume, and recreate the shares and DNS aliases.
The target recovery time should come from business-defined RPO and RTO requirements. Some environments invest in replicated multi-site infrastructure and can recover in minutes; others restore from a local NAS and take many hours. A practical setup is local backup storage for fast recovery plus immutable or off-site copies for disaster scenarios. Run full recovery drills at least annually, and test smaller restores more often.
A backup that has never been restored is only an assumption. Measure the real restore speed and compare it with what the business expects.
Array snapshots can make certain restores nearly instant. We can roll a file share or volume back to a point in time, or clone the snapshot as a separate volume, mount it to a new VM, and switch over after testing. That works well for quick operational recovery, but snapshots on the production array should not be your only backup; you still need independent copies for array failure, corruption, or ransomware.
Exactly—snapshots are useful recovery points, but I’d treat them as part of the backup strategy rather than a replacement for an isolated or off-site backup.
A disaster-recovery exercise should include a post-mortem: document what worked, what was missing, and what needs to change before the next test.