A hotel close to the Birmingham NEC had a failure of their main server a couple of weeks ago – it continually crashed whenever it tried to boot up into Windows.  It failed early on Saturday morning and their existing IT Support provider was unable to get it back up and working by the evening so we were asked to help.  Fortunately the hotel and the IT Support provider uses our HOTBackup backup and disaster recovery software.

One of our engineers arrived onsite with a loan server and began the process of performing a disaster recovery restore from the on-site backup repository to a temporary virtual machine, whilst at the same time also looking to fix whatever was causing their existing server to crash.  Due to the amount of files to be restored and the speed of the network, the restore was going to take 13 or so hours.   Unfortunately whatever was causing the server crash couldn’t be fixed, so instead the engineer restored the System State and C: drive back to the previous backup.  A little over 5 hours later the server was back up and functioning once more.

What’s the moral of the story?  Well, crashes, hangs and failures do happen from time to time (we’ve all experienced that!) but if you use our HOTBackup software then a failure should only ever be an inconvenience and not a catastrophic loss.