How to Run an Acronis Disaster Recovery Test Failover

Introduction

Testing your disaster recovery plan ensures your business recovers quickly during a real emergency. Specifically, a test failover safely boots your recovery server on an isolated network. Consequently, you can validate your backups without disrupting your live production environment. This process solves the problem of untested backups. Furthermore, it allows you to check your applications and confirm your recovery times safely.

Prerequisites

  • Access to the Nexcess or Liquid Web hosting portal, with Owner, or Secondary Owner permissions.
  • An active Acronis backup plan with Disaster Recovery on a server.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Follow these steps to safely simulate a failover event:

  1. First, log in to your Nexcess or Liquid Web Hosting portal. Next, navigate to the Servers tab in the left-hand menu and open the My Servers dashboard.
  2. Select the specific server you want to test. 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 Test failover at the top of the screen. Then, choose your desired backup recovery point.
  6. Click Start to safely boot your recovery server inside the isolated network sandbox.
  7. Connect to this isolated testing server using the Public IP which is found in the right-hand menu drawer. Finally, verify that your applications function correctly.
  8. Once validation concludes, you must explicitly stop the test failover in the Acronis console.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Why must I tear down a test failover quickly?

While test failovers are essential, they consume significant shared cloud resources. Therefore, you must end your testing as soon as validation is complete. Crucially, powering the virtual machine off does not properly stop the test. You must actively click stop in the Acronis console. Furthermore, Nexcess will alert you if a test runs beyond 24 hours.

Can Nexcess run this test for me?

You must initiate and run your own disaster recovery testing. While our support team has a limited ability assist upon request, we do not run the test for you.