Backup & Disaster Recovery

Don’t Worry—Be Certain, with Backup Recovery Testing

30 June, 2020

There’s a natural human tendency to put things off. When you’re as busy as the typical managed services provider (MSP) (responding to customers, working to gain new ones, and dealing with the day-to-day management of multiple IT infrastructures), it’s especially easy to postpone things that are time consuming or tedious—things like testing your backups.

We talk a lot about the importance of test recovery. I’ve blogged about it before. A guest post on our sister blog, Orange Matter, also stresses the importance of testing. However, as long as test recoveries take time and resources you don’t have to spare, you’ll likely continue to put it off.

And yet, lack of testing may result in worry in the back of your mind. When the heat is on and you need recovery, will you encounter any surprises? And how long will recovery take?

That’s why SolarWinds^® created our newest Backup feature—Recovery Testing. This new capability, just out of beta and now generally available, automates the process of regular, scheduled test recoveries for your customers’ most important servers. With Recovery Testing, the biggest reasons to delay testing disappear.

Time

Manual disaster recovery (DR) testing takes time you likely don’t have to spare. With SolarWinds Backup Recovery Testing, you can enroll servers in a test plan in just a few clicks. Simply define which servers you want to test and whether you want to test them automatically every 30 or 14 days. That’s it! No more time required.

Resources

You use to need your own secondary data center to perform DR test recoveries. Then virtualization made it easier—all you needed was a VM. Recovery Testing makes it even easier. SolarWinds provides the VM in the cloud, automatically spins it up, recovers the backup to the VM, takes a screen shot, and destroys the VM. The whole process is automated and designed for security, requiring no special resources on your side.

Reporting

One of the reasons to perform regular test recoveries is to document and demonstrate the value of your ongoing data protection service. Customers appreciate the reassurance that their data is not only backed up, but also verified as recoverable. With Recovery Testing, you can set up automatic reports to go out to customers upon test completion. Or, if you prefer, you can simply include test results (including a screen shot of the booted VM) as part of your regular monthly customer reporting.

Insight

Until you’ve performed a test recovery, you can only guess how long restoring a specific server will take. It’s hard to set customer expectations when you don’t know if a specific recovery will take minutes or hours. Automated recovery testing in the cloud environment we provide won’t be the same as real-world recovery to your own environment, but it will give you a sense of what to expect, which can make a real difference at recovery time.

So don’t continue to put it off. Ease your recovery worries, starting today. Save time and gain peace of mind with regular reports that include screenshot verification your system state, file, and folder backups are recoverable and ready should the need arise.

Click here to learn more about Recovery Testing with SolarWinds Backup.

Carrie Reber is senior product marketing manager for SolarWinds MSP.