Make Sure Your Backups Are Useful for Recovery
What’s worse than not having backups? Thinking you have backups and finding out they aren’t any good when you need to restore from them during a crisis.
The backup process is often complex, depending upon many factors including software, networks, and storage to complete successfully. Without careful monitoring, it’s easy for backups to fail without anyone noticing until it’s too late.
Microsoft Azure provides tools to help you make your backup process easier, like Azure Backup Server. Azure Backup Server lets you automate backups from on-premises virtual machines (VMs) to the cloud without needing to install an agent. Azure now also offers the Azure Backup Pre-check to help make sure your VMs are set up for backup success.
Azure Backup Pre-Check Features
The Azure Backup Pre-Check tool verifies VM configurations before a scheduled backup, displays details in the Recovery Services Vault dashboard, alerts users if a VM configuration can lead to failure, and offers suggestions for corrections. The check looks for issues such as an out of date VM agent or network issues and reports status as either:
- Passed – No VM configuration issues impacting backups were found.
- Warning – The VM configuration contains issues that may potentially cause backup failures.
- Critical – The VM configuration contains issues that definitely will cause backup failures.
Using Azure Backup Pre-Check ensures that all your VMs are checked for issues each time a scheduled backup is run, so no risks will go unnoticed. Because issues are rated as “warning” or “critical”, you can focus on resolving the critical problems first, letting your staff work most efficiently to get backups back into working order.
To use Azure Backup Pre-Check, simply go to the Recovery Services Vault dashboard. Then drill down to the details of any issues by clicking on VMs showing either Warning or Critical as their status. You can then view the notification of the problem and the steps needed to correct it.
Test Backups and Disaster Recovery
Even backups that are complete aren’t helpful if you don’t know what to do to get the files you need out of them. Once you know your backups are working reliably, the next step is to make sure you can use them successfully as part of your disaster recovery strategy. Make sure you know how to locate the data you need from your backups and how to restore either individual files or an entire server.
Have you tested your backup and recovery process? Give Prescient Solutions a call to make sure your backups are running properly and you understand how to work with them to restore missing data. As a Microsoft Partner, our team is expert in all facets of Azure, including its backup support. We’ll design, implement, manage, and monitor a backup and disaster recovery strategy that makes sure the backups are useful for their most important purpose: protecting your business.
Additional Disaster Recovery Resources
Prepare Your Data Center to Handle the Storm
Disaster Recovery Planning Requires More Than Scheduled Backups
