Advice needed on testing SIMS, Document Server and Discover restores

[KeyData]

Hello,

 

We use REDSTOR to backup our SIMS and SIMS Discover databases along with our Document Management Server.

Is it possible to do a test restore without overwriting our production data and then to check this restored data is working by logging into these restored databases?

 

I thought we might be able to use DBAttach to attach the restored data with a different name such as SIMSRestoreTest and then log in and check all is well?

 

Does anyone have any experience of doing this or similar and would be happy to share their method or guidance?

 

Thanks.

[psydii]

They way we've done it in the past is a full domain recovery + the sims server into an isolated environment. No need to dbattach, as the server comes back in full.

[KeyData]

Thanks psydii. How often would you advise doing a test restore?

[psydii]

A full bare-metal test? More often that we do, so I'd say at least once a year? 

 

However we are testing that we can restore the backup file generated by dbattach (i.e. extract it from the remote backup of the sims server) more frequently than that.

 

Which is why I know our dbattach backup script has stopped working - the expected files were missing when I went to perform our most recent check!

[KeyData]

Thanks again @psydii. I really appreciate that.