Questions tagged [disaster-recovery]

Disaster recovery and preparedness is an unfortunate aspect of systems administration. This tag should be used for help with planning, implementation and best-practices related to recovering from a catastrophic event on a server or in a datacenter environment.

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150 votes
9 answers
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Monday morning mistake: sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /

Please note: The answers and comments to this question contains content from another, similar question that has received a lot of attention from outside media but turned out to be hoax question in ...
Jonas Bylov's user avatar
  • 1,613
122 votes
13 answers
7k views

Engineers are using explosives to remove hard rock outside our office building. What countermeasures should we take?

Our building is located approx. 100 meters from the explosive charges. They happen several times per day, and really shake the entire building a lot. This is going to go on for many days and the ...
Chris Dale's user avatar
  • 1,553
51 votes
6 answers
26k views

How to backup GPG?

What are the critical files I need to backup from GPG? I guess my private key would qualify of course, but what else?
jldupont's user avatar
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40 votes
20 answers
9k views

What's your checklist for when everything blows up?

Users can't get to their e-mail, the CEO can't get to the company's home page, and your pager just went off with a "911" code. What do you do when everything blows up?
Jon Galloway's user avatar
  • 1,506
36 votes
10 answers
69k views

Unmount a nfs mount where the nfs server has disappeared

Server A used to be a NFS server. Server B was mounting an export of that. Everything was fine. Then A died. Just switched off. Gone. Vanished. However that folder is still mounted on B. I obviously ...
Amandasaurus's user avatar
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35 votes
7 answers
2k views

What things do you look for when picking a server hosting company?

We are going through an RFP process of changing hosting companies for most of our servers (~10 fairly powerful workhorses and database servers). When the existing company was picked I wasn't at the ...
ProfessionalAmateur's user avatar
32 votes
4 answers
3k views

My server room has flooded

We recently went through a hurricane and our server room became flooded. Hooray for insurance. Anyway, I need to save as much data off one of the hard drives as possible. Yes, it was submerged for ...
Critologist's user avatar
29 votes
11 answers
2k views

Disaster recovery plan development best practicies or resources? [closed]

I have been tasked with leading a project regarding updating a old and somewhat onesided disaster recovery plan. For now we're just looking at getting the IT side of DR sorted out. The last time ...
Laura Thomas's user avatar
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26 votes
5 answers
10k views

BBWC: in theory a good idea but has one ever saved your data?

I'm familiar with what a BBWC (Battery-backed write cache) is intended to do - and previously used them in my servers even with good UPS. There are obvously failures it does not provide protection for....
symcbean's user avatar
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26 votes
2 answers
2k views

Retrieving an RSA key from a running instance of Apache?

I created an RSA keypair for an SSL certificate and stored the private key in /etc/ssl/private/server.key. Unfortunately this was the only copy of the private key that I had. Then I accidentally ...
Nathan Osman's user avatar
  • 2,725
19 votes
9 answers
6k views

Architecture for highly available MySQL with automatic failover in physically diverse locations

I have been researching high availability (HA) solutions for MySQL between data centers. For servers located in the same physical environment, I have preferred dual master with heartbeat (floating ...
Warner's user avatar
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17 votes
9 answers
1k views

Documentation As-A-Manual vs. Documentation As-A-Checklist

I've had discussions in the past with other people in my department about documentation, specifically, level-of-detail and requirements. In their view, documentation is a simple checklist of Y things ...
Avery Payne's user avatar
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15 votes
6 answers
29k views

How to recover from a drive failure in a RAID 5 configuration?

This morning a drive failed on our database server. The drive array (3 disks) is setup in a RAID 5 configuration. While we wait for a drive replacement we are preparing for a recovery strategy. Users ...
Philip Fourie's user avatar
15 votes
7 answers
3k views

Setting up a new backup scheme

I'm in the process of designing my first ever backup scheme. I'm completely new to managing data backup, and there are some concepts that I don't totally understand. Here's what I've got so far, and ...
Citizen Chin's user avatar
14 votes
4 answers
804 views

IT lead does not have a backup, DR plan in writing [closed]

This is a general management question to IT managers out there. We are a small firm with about 4 servers in our colo cabinent. No full time IT manager. But we do have one person on monthly contract ...
Alex's user avatar
  • 259
13 votes
3 answers
15k views

Battery Backed Write Cache

I recently got some U server price quotes and some of them include BBWC: What exactly does it do? Is it just for RAID configurations? If there is a power malfunction, isn't the data loss inevitable?...
Dani's user avatar
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12 votes
3 answers
38k views

How to actually use mysql slave as soon the master is failover or got burnt

I have MySQL master-slave replication that works fine; I googled the whole net and MySQL site to find the standard procedure to make use of the replication but found nothing. It is as if admins are ...
Jawad Al Shaikh's user avatar
12 votes
4 answers
5k views

How do I backup my TRAC installations?

We use separate TRAC instances as our ticket system for many projects and need to have them moved off site several times a day for disaster recovery. What is the best way to make this happen? Is ...
Mike Schall's user avatar
11 votes
12 answers
688 views

What's the first thing you check when an untouched unix server starts going berserk?

So you have this neatly setup unix server and it's super fast and works swell and everything is great for months, and suddenly all kinds of weird errors start showing up for a variety of different ...
kch's user avatar
  • 4,632
11 votes
5 answers
673 views

High server availabilty for a small business

After having a bit of scare with a server that wouldn't come up one morning, the higher ups have decided that the business needs a high availability / fail over setup. We have 5 main servers (4x ...
Matthew's user avatar
  • 175
9 votes
3 answers
3k views

Database accidentally deleted with a bash script [duplicate]

Edit: a follow-up question: Restore mongoDB by --repair and WiredTiger. My developer committed a huge mistake and we cannot find our Mongo database anywhere in the server. He logged into the server, ...
SoftTimur's user avatar
  • 337
9 votes
3 answers
9k views

Active Directory disaster recovery with DPM

I have a sort of catch-22 question here. Suppose I'm using Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (2010 or 2012, it works the same way) to backup, amongst various other things, my Active ...
Massimo's user avatar
  • 70.7k
8 votes
1 answer
2k views

Does one failed drive + one single bad sector destroy an entire RAID 5?

During planning my RAID setup on a Synology Disk Station I've done a lot of reading about various RAID types, being this a great reading: RAID levels and the importance of URE (Unrecoverable Read ...
adamsfamily's user avatar
8 votes
1 answer
4k views

Recover data from SCSI hard disk

We've got an old server with SCSI hard disk. The server crashed last week and it isn't exactly known what hardware component is damaged. Since the server is due to be retired anyway we don't want to ...
Tom's user avatar
  • 101
8 votes
3 answers
2k views

Backing up VirtualBox VMs

Does anyone have a good complete strategy for backing up a bunch of virtual machines running under VirtualBox? I intend to run a handful of virtual machines on a single hardware platform and back ...
James Green's user avatar
8 votes
1 answer
4k views

Recovery strategy for Master-Master replication

I have implemented a HA solution for mysql based on master-master replication. There is a mechanism on the front end part which guarantees that only one db will be read/written to at a given time (i.e....
David Cournapeau's user avatar
7 votes
3 answers
7k views

If DNS Failover is not recommended, what is?

As a followup question to his very popular question: Why is DNS failover not recommended?, I think it was agreed that DNS failover is not 100% reliable due to caching. However the highest voted ...
IMB's user avatar
  • 511
7 votes
2 answers
4k views

How to recover data from an Exchange 2013 database after a complete Active Directory loss?

Scenario: a single Exchange 2013 server in a Windows Server 2003 AD domain; one DC malfunctioned months ago and was dismissed (without proper demotion, no less); the other DC died yesterday and there ...
Massimo's user avatar
  • 70.7k
7 votes
1 answer
3k views

How do I configure a stretch cluster without shared storage between two sites?

I am trying to redesign our IT infrastructure and seeking help in implementing DR solution for our company. I see that as 2 data centers in active-passive mode with the data replication. Currently ...
katyn12's user avatar
  • 155
7 votes
5 answers
3k views

Local to Remote Webserver Failover

Short and sweet, I don't suppose you'll need more detail than this: We host our website on an in-house webserver. A catastrophe has and will happen again where communication from the web into/out ...
7 votes
2 answers
6k views

Hadoop HDFS Backup & DR Strategy

We are preparing to implement our first Hadoop cluster. As such we are starting out small with a four node setup. (1 master node, and 3 worker nodes) Each node will have 6TB of storage. (6 x 1TB disks)...
Matt Keller's user avatar
7 votes
2 answers
2k views

In 2020 - are there any viable Linux block-level replication alternatives for DRBD? [closed]

I'm researching how can we implement near-realtime replication from primary datacenter to a disaster recovery site. Data that would get replicated would be: Images of KVM VMs MySQL and PostgreSQL ...
pQd's user avatar
  • 30.1k
6 votes
5 answers
7k views

What's the difference between a Disaster Recovery Plan and a Business Continuity Plan?

I used to think both terms referred to the exact same thing, but one of my clients just requested to have a look at both documents. The request emanates from the security department of a very big ...
Brann's user avatar
  • 630
6 votes
5 answers
18k views

LVM vs RAID0 vs RAID "linear" - Combine 2 disks as one, data recovery?

given two 2TB USB external disks that have to be combined to one 4TB volume and formatted with one big Filesystem (XFS), I have a small question to ask. Does LVM provide better Data recovery, should ...
leto's user avatar
  • 271
6 votes
5 answers
471 views

Fault tolerant server structure for the smallest of businesses

I'm trying to figure out what to do for a small business that has been plagued by ridiculous hardware problems. Right now, this business runs on five or six desktop machines; no server infrastructure ...
bwerks's user avatar
  • 752
6 votes
2 answers
814 views

WHEN to put the contingency plan into action in case of a main server failure?

We have a production SQL Server database server shipping transactional log backups to two standby servers. The disaster recovery plan is already finished: we have a well documented procedure and ...
IT2's user avatar
  • 63
6 votes
3 answers
246 views

Disaster Recovery Planning, tower or rack?

I'm working on this project to develop a system with centralized information regarding emergencies delivered via open Wi-Fi on a small city. I'm from Chile, so we thought of this system to work ...
user avatar
6 votes
3 answers
3k views

Reconstructing .bashrc from running session

I accidentally deleted my .bashrc. I still have the terminal running. What settings can I recover? I already have the aliases (from the alias command). I assume that all ifs and cases are gone, but I ...
Ada's user avatar
  • 93
6 votes
2 answers
269 views

Green System Administrator looking for helpful tips [closed]

I have just been promoted to Systems Administrator for our product. We are designing a application that communicates with the cloud(Amazon EC2). I will be in charge of maintaining all Instances and ...
Joshua Anderson's user avatar
6 votes
3 answers
3k views

Is DFSR designed for use for Disaster Recovery?

We are currently working on implementing a DR strategy. Instead of SAN-SAN replication, it has been decided to have 2 live file servers replicating via DFSR. However, I don't know whether or not this ...
Bigbio2002's user avatar
  • 2,833
6 votes
2 answers
1k views

Active Directory Disaster Recovery in a Small Business

This is hypothetical question, but one I’m sure that someone must have encountered and/or given some thought to before. Situation: Consider this, a small business is running an Active Directory ...
Fitzroy's user avatar
  • 321
6 votes
2 answers
745 views

Automated bare-metal recovery practices for small network

I have several machines which are on a small network with one DC and 3 to 5 workstations on the network at any given time. These are all setup with DNS and AD on the same server. I want the ability ...
Scott's user avatar
  • 183
6 votes
1 answer
364 views

Recovering lost VHDX / VM (deleted by Veeam)

Earlier this week a VM on one of our hypervisors experienced extended downtime (~24 hours) due to some Windows updates going wrong. I ultimately was able to fix the issue, and noticed yesterday that ...
Kevin Jones's user avatar
6 votes
2 answers
3k views

MySQL replication issues after a power outage

After a power outage at our data centre, the slave MySQL databases are struggling. This is in the logs for one of the slaves: 100118 10:05:56 [Note] Slave I/O thread: connected to master 'repl@db1:...
jabley's user avatar
  • 335
5 votes
4 answers
400 views

Virtualization for hardware resiliency?

Can anyone tell me if it is possible to pool several physical servers to run a resilient virtualization environment. Our servers are getting more and more critical to our clients and we want to do ...
Kev's user avatar
  • 249
5 votes
5 answers
54k views

Edit Hard Disk Serial Number with VMware

I'm virtualizing a Rockwell AssetCentre Server and I'm looking at Disaster Recovery scenarios. This server contains a lot of other Rockwell Software like RSLinx, Logix 5000, Logix 500, and more... ...
Lucretius's user avatar
  • 459
5 votes
4 answers
555 views

Disaster Recovery/Sabotage Protection for a small business

I've been contacted by two partners in a small professional firm. They are concerned about their other partner and want to take some steps to be absolutely sure that the company's data and systems ...
Ward - Trying Codidact's user avatar
5 votes
6 answers
460 views

Can A Virtual Machine Be Converted to a Virtual Server e.g VMWare?

The Simple Question Can I convert an existing VM to a Virtual Server (e.g. VMWare)? I'm using Oracle's one and only awesome product, VirtualBox, and I'm trying to setup a SharePoint Farm to ...
pixelbobby's user avatar
5 votes
2 answers
1k views

Best practice for IIS 6.0 (Windows Server 2003) backups?

What is the best backup strategy for saving IIS 6.0 data: web metadata, files, logs etc. for disaster recovery?
splattne's user avatar
  • 28.6k
5 votes
3 answers
2k views

How can you recover a SQL Server database if the ldf file has been deleted

We had a drive die and lost the ldf file, but the mdf file is in tact. Is there a process for re-connecting to the mdf file, considering the ldf lost? I have searched without much luck.
Tom Lianza's user avatar

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