Testing. Make sure everything works before it must work.

Backup scripts generate new files every night. No hard drives screech and whine so far. Air conditioning in server room works. Now is the time to test backups and recovery.

Explain what's involved with testing

• Either using a recent backup of a machine or set up a backup using Clonezilla, Symantec Ghost, Carbon Copy Cloner, or a similar disk-imaging program.
• Spin up a matching image as an Amazon AWS EC2 instance.
• Load clone / disk image onto EC2 instance and test.

Do you want to test your database recovery procedures? Let's talk.