Disaster Recovery Test the old-fashioned way

[Loki1973]

Hi all,

I'm having the following problem and I just can't get it to work.

We're doing a disaster recovery test and we've done the following:

* Backup using NTBACKUP for the filesystem and System State. Just to make sure we've included the partitions on which the Exchange database are located.
* Backup using NTBACKUP for only the storage groups. Complete backup
* Pulled the plug on the machine
* Reset the computer account

Recovering the machine itself works just fine (OS, filesystem and System State). Joined the domain just fine. The Computer Object contains the original creation date, so I'm sure it is reusing the computer account.

At this point we've not yet recovered the databases.

If I open the Exchange System Manager everything looks familiar including the menu layout and stuff. ADC seems to be running just fine on this new baby (another thing that makes me believe everything is ok for now).

The database files are (of course) missing at this point.

As soon as I want to start restoring the databases I get these events:

8018 Restore Begin
8002 Restore settings
9635 Failed to find a database to restore to...
904 0xC7FE1F42 Database not found.

So, what I did was Mount the IS. It wants to create a new database but warns not to do so if I want to restore an earlier backup (is a backup not always earlier??). Because it doesn't work I still choose to create an empty one.
I Dismount the database again and set the storage group to "Allow to overwrite".

Now, when I restore I get EXACTLY the same errors.
I am at a loss. Any suggestions?

Thanks a lot for any help.
Rob.

 

[ShackDaddy]

You aren't taking Recovery Storage Groups into consideration, and your server is looking for one. You either need to use RSG or add a reg entry to get around using them. Read the following KB article to sort things out.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/824126

Shackdaddy

 

[Loki1973]

The problem is solved.

The problem was in the backup. There was a storage recovery group active on the original machine, which was included in the backup. This failed the restore constantly because the original database wasn't there yet.

We removed the RSG from the original server and then retried the backup. It worked flawlessly.

Leaves me with one question.

If I want to use a full backup to do a disaster recovery, would I be fine to HAVE an RSG on my original server but not back it up, or would I to get rid of the RSG before every full backup?