@Tomastoria,

Since I'm backing up the entire virtual machine as-is, I can do as many test restores as I want with no involvement with AC. If you want to test AC backup, you have to call AC and set aside time/money/your own test server/etc.

When I worked at General Electric Global Nuclear Fuels, and also at Corning Fiber Optic, we had lots of things in place to prevent data loss besides just backups.

* Hyper-V Failover Clusters
* SQL Server in-guest clusters (a SQL Server cluster within the afore mentioned Hyper-V cluster)
* Backups that includes nightly full backups with hourly incrementals.
* RAID 6 or RAID10 arrays
* Storage arrays with multiple back-planes and multiple controllers.

Some of the setups I did you could lose 4 SAS cables, 2 disks, an entire server, and an array controller all at once and you would have no data loss and roughly 4 minutes of downtime as the surviving server took over the cluster and powered your VMs back on. That setup was also north of $90k.

Add that on top of my C#/VB.Net/SQL language programming skillset, SQL Server Administration, Group Policy/Active Directory, and all the other IT stuff I know including Azure, pfSense, and Juniper Administration.

I love being me.

JamesNT

James Summerlin
My personal site: http://www.dataintegrationsolutions.net
james@dataintegrationsolutions.net