Has anyone here actually restored a full server from their backups?

Paul Wellner Bou

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Backups get discussed a lot, restores almost never. I have nightly snapshots going off box and I check the job exits clean, but until last month I had never rebuilt a whole server from them.

Did it as a drill on a spare VPS and it took most of a day, mostly because of things that were never in the backup to begin with: the CSF config, the cron that runs the backup itself, and a couple of PHP extensions someone installed by hand two years ago.

The data restored fine. The server around the data was the problem.

Does anyone here run a restore drill on a schedule, or is it one of those things everyone means to get to? And if you do it, do you rebuild the OS layer from scratch or keep an image of it separately?
 

TheCompWiz

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Quarterly here, and what turned it from a formality into something useful was timing it and writing the number down. First drill ran eleven hours, nearly all of it spent discovering what was never in the backup. Third was under two, because by then the gaps had been closed one at a time.

On the OS layer I stopped backing it up and rebuilt it from a provisioning script instead, so the script is the backup and it gets exercised on every new box rather than once a year with something on fire. Data comes from the dump, the machine around it comes from the script. What still catches me is state that lives in neither, and TLS certificates are the usual one. Cheap to reissue, but only once DNS points at the new host, which during a real restore it does not yet.
 
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