How to Run an Acronis Disaster Recovery Production Failover

Introduction

When a catastrophic event strikes your primary server, a production failover is your immediate response. Specifically, this procedure transfers your live workloads to a standby recovery server in the Acronis cloud. Consequently, your applications resume serving traffic quickly. This solves prolonged downtime and protects your revenue during a critical outage. Instead of waiting for a full server rebuild, you switch to a ready-made replica.

Prerequisites

  • Portal Access: You will need to log into the Nexcess or Liquid Web hosting portal, with Owner, or Secondary Owner permissions.
  • Active Replication: An active Acronis backup plan and Disaster Recovery enabled with recovery points.
  • Declared Disaster: You must determine that your primary server is unrecoverable in a reasonable timeframe. We will never initiate this process for you.
  • Failback Timeline: A failover is a temporary state. You have a strict maximum of seven days to repair your primary server and fail back.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Follow these steps to safely simulate a failover event:

  1. First, log in to your Nexcess portal. Next, navigate to the Servers tab in the left-hand menu and open the My Servers dashboard.
  2. Select the specific server experiencing the outage. Then, click on the Backups tab.
  3. Click the See all in Acronis button to authenticate automatically. Consequently, a new tab opens directly to the management drawer for your server.
  4. Next, click the Failover button located in the right-hand menu drawer.
  5. Ensure you select Production failover at the top of the screen.
  6. Choose your desired backup recovery point. Usually, you should select the latest available point to minimize data loss.
  7. Click Start to initiate the emergency procedure.

Close public access to the original server

To avoid interference and unwanted issues, ensure that the original workload is not online or cannot be accessed by the public.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

How long can I stay in this failover state?

A production failover is strictly a temporary emergency measure. Consequently, you have a strict maximum of seven days to repair your primary server and execute a failback.

How do I return to normal operations?

You must perform a “failback” to return your live workloads to your repaired primary Nexcess server. Crucially, never simply click “Stop failover” to end the event. Stopping a failover without failing back permanently deletes the recovery server, and you will lose all new data.