Disaster recovery and database recovery error preparation

Having a well designed and tested disaster recovery plan is essential for managing IT systems. All systems have their own peculiar requirements . Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan  will help in minimising risk and measuring the impact of a DR.

But despite all the best planning It is worth testing the DR plans regularly to actually check the recovery from the disaster occurs.

As a DBA having knowledge of the potential recovery issues and how to get out of them  will help you and the more exposure you have to the common issues will help keep the stress levels under management.

Having properly defined RPO  and monitoring of backups will help . There are plenty of methods to check\monitor  backups have completed successfully - here's  a Script to check if a SQL database has a backup

During the server recovery phase these are some common issues I’ve confronted. Depending on your infrastructure there is a wide range

> Databases OFFLINE – Check SQL Database Status with sys.databases  

> Databases in  RECOVER PENDING/SUSPECT  - The Main reasons for database stuck in RECOVERY_PENDING after a sudden shutdown

1) Log is missing

2) Log is corrupt

3) Drive not online

For possible actions to take - One or more files do not match the primary file of the database – Error 5173

> 823 disk error – Read more on MSDB Suspect pages table and bad pages

> Drive mapping failure – recover drive 

> File corruption – recover file 

Read more on Disaster Recover planning 

Decrease database risk

Redundancy for SQL Server