Your backup data may be corrupted over time due to hardware failure or storage problems. If a disaster were to happen, your data recovery process may fail due to errors caused by corrupted or incomplete backup data. As a best practice, the integrity of your backup data should be tested with regular recovery drills to ensure full recoverability. Although organizations conducting regular recovery drills can be time-consuming, resource-intensive, and disruptive to existing workflows, it ultimately benefits their customers.
Ahsay Restore Drill provides MSPs with an efficient and cost-effective option for ensuring their backup data's health and complete confidence in backup data recoverability. Enables MSPs to conduct regular disaster recovery drills without needing to deploy or purchase additional hardware. All Restore Drills can be done using existing resources.
What are the benefits?
Ahsay Restore Drill helps you by fully automating regular testing of your backups. It gives backup data a regular clean bill of health for extra peace of mind, along with a restore report to certify the status of your backup data.
Users will view the details in the Restore Drill report if data corruption is detected. Ahsay will run a backup job to ensure the latest files are uploaded to replace the corrupted files to ensure the backup data is recoverable.
How does it work?
The Restore Drill process compares the checksum values of the files restored during the current drill with those generated by the original backup job. The comparison is done for all files in the backup, including those in retention. The feature must be enabled for each backup set and a Restore Drill interval must be set, i.e. every 6 months, 12 months, or 24 months. The default Restore Drill interval is every 6 months. Furthermore, the system administrator can initiate an ad-hoc Restore Drill job to validate the health of backup data stored on the AhsayCBS backup server at any time using the Ahsay web-based management console.
The Ahsay Restore Drill is scheduled and executed from either the Ahsay backup server or the Ahsay backup agent running on the client's machine, depending on the location of the actual backup data. If a backup set has more than one storage destination, the Restore Drill job will validate the data based on ordering the storage destination on the backup set one after the other.
- Suppose the backup data is stored directly on the Ahsay backup server, which applies to agentless and agent-based backups. The Ahsay backup server will do the scheduling and checksum comparison of the backup data. No download of the backup data is required.
- For agentless backups where the backup data is stored on a predefined destination, the Ahsay backup server will do the scheduling and checksum comparison of the backup data. The backup data must be downloaded to the Ahsay backup server for this task.
- If the backup job is run by the Ahsay backup agent and the backup data is stored locally on the client site, FTP/SFTP server, or cloud storage, the scheduling and checksum comparison of the backup data will be made by the Ahsay backup agent running on the client machine. For backup data stored remotely on FTP/SFTP server or cloud storage, it is downloaded for checksum generation and comparison. No download is required for backup data stored on local storage.
