I apologize if I came across rude, but that was my reflex after seeing your little add in sqlcentral newsletter.

Your experience really made me think again about backup procedures. I also discussed your article with my colleagues at work (IT dept). Some people think 2h 45m under those conditions is formidable recovery time, some disagree. I think that hardware failure plus not having enough time to prepare backup box plus not physically being there made it all very difficult. But I was surprised you didn’t have restore scripts ready (taking care of spids, logins/users, etc.)

Couple of questions:

1.) How many databases were recovered?

2.) What was used to move backups to tape?

3.) You said one box was co-located. Different domain I guess. I also gues you transferred users/logins through script?

Very useful article, thanks!