I had an opportunity at the weekend to test our disaster recovery plan. Our Exchange Server had crashed, I had to get some important information from it (the location of a birthday party my son was going to), and I had two options: go to the office and fix the Exchange server, or as we have a Live Backup BDR I could remotely configure a Virtual Server on there and restore our Exchange server to it – as a temporary measure, and extract the info I needed that way. Sledgehammer to crack a nut, but the technology is there so why not use it?
But I hit a snag. Embarrasingly the recovery password for our Live Backup was stored on our help desk server, and that was unavailable because of the other server crashing. That meant I did not have the recovery key, which meant I couldn’t recover the server. I could have extracted it from the help desk server if the disaster was for real, but it would have been a time consuming task. And had the whole office burnt down, then there was no way I could have got it back.
Of course now I have that password saved securely away from the office. But it brought home to me the importance of the disaster recovery plan. And the importance of keeping that plan off-site and making sure the correct information is in it, and the correct people can get it.
(I drove to the office and rebooted the server, it came straight back up and George got to his party in time.)