Best option for Disaster Recovery Testing?

[Roly_Rodriguez]

Next week we will be testing our Disaster Recovery plan. What is the best way to test it with respect to Backup Exec? With Arcserve we used to be able to just plant the database files in the folder and it would recognize it, but since BE 11d uses SQL Express 2005, what is the best/quickest way of getting the database restored for restoration?

[Hywel_Mallett]

It depends how big a disaster you are simulating. If you are restoring your BE media server from scratch, follow the procedure in the Administrator's Guide (or see Performing a local Disaster Recovery). If your DR BE media server is already built, provided you have no SQL database files available, I believe BE will automatically recover the BEDB.bak file, so just make sure that's available.

[Joshua_Small]

I may well have misunderstood you, but if your concern is along the lines of "how do I restore my Veritas data so Veritas knows how to restore the tape",  you don't necessarily need to do any special restore.

In a "complete replacement" scenario, we basically

- Install a base OS and Service Pack updates

- Install a blank install of Veritas

- Inventory and catalogue the tape. Veritas then knows what's on it and how to restore it regardless of other factors

- Restore away!

[Roly_Rodriguez]

Joshua, that is exactly what I was referring to. I believe this DR test will be the one that pushes us over to exploring VMWare for Virtualizing all of our x86 Windows Servers as well.

As obvious as it may appear (just reaffirming actually), we also need to install windows client agents as well, correct?

[William_2]

As I now understand it BE is not really designed for disasters. It seems to assume you will be restoring to identical hardware. At least under SBS 2003 R2 it does not seem capable of restoring to different hardware and even doing a Windows repair on the subsequent restore does not give one a valid restored system.

I found the MS supplied ntbackup did at least work.

BE may still be much better for the day to day file loss and restoration to the same hardware - BUT not to different hardware !