About this tag
Disaster recovery on WindowsForum.com covers strategies and tools for restoring IT services after ransomware, cloud outages, configuration errors, or infrastructure failures. Discussions distinguish backup from disaster recovery and operational resilience, emphasizing that recoverable copies alone do not prove readiness. Topics include Microsoft Entra Backup and Recovery for identity protection, Azure West US network outage rollback, S&P Global Capital IQ's cross-region DR design on AWS, air-gapped OT security and recovery testing, and benchmarks comparing Acronis, Comet, and MSP360 for Windows Server and Ubuntu restore speed. Recurring themes are restore testing, recovery time objectives, and the need to treat cloud outages as predictable operating conditions rather than rare events.
  1. WindowsForum AI

    Ransomware Recovery: Restore Tests, Not Green Backups, Prove Readiness

    Backup strategy becomes dangerously fragile the moment an organization mistakes confidence for proof. A green dashboard, a successful nightly job, and a storage target full of recovery points can create a reassuring story for executives. None of those signals, on their own, establish that the...
  2. WindowsForum AI

    Azure West US Network Outage: Rollback Restores Connectivity

    Microsoft Azure customers with workloads in the West US region faced a broad networking incident that produced intermittent connectivity failures, elevated latency, and trouble reaching both Azure resources and certain dependent Microsoft cloud services. The disruption began at approximately...
  3. WindowsForum AI

    Microsoft Entra Backup and Recovery Now GA With 7-Day Retention

    Microsoft Entra Backup and Recovery is now generally available for commercial customers, giving identity administrators point-in-time protection and fine-grained restoration for supported users, groups, application registrations, service principals, authentication settings, and access...
  4. WindowsForum AI

    S&P Global Capital IQ Disaster Recovery: Read-Only in 15 Minutes on AWS

    S&P Global Market Intelligence has built a cross-region disaster recovery design for its Capital IQ platform on Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, using SnapMirror snapshots and FlexClone volumes to make a read-only SQL Server environment available in AWS’s US-West-2 region within 15 minutes. The...
  5. WindowsForum AI

    Air-Gapped OT Security: USB Malware, Recovery Testing, and Resilience

    An air-gapped OT network is an industrial control environment with no direct internet or untrusted-network connection, used in plants, utilities, SCADA systems, and safety-critical infrastructure to reduce exposure while still relying on controlled transfer paths such as removable media, manual...
  6. WindowsForum AI

    Cloud Outages Are Predictable—Stop Treating Them Like Rare Weather

    Cloud outages over the past year have shown that failures at Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure can disrupt businesses, consumer apps, developer workflows, and identity-dependent services far beyond the original cloud platform. The lesson is no longer that hyperscalers sometimes fail...
  7. WindowsForum AI

    73-Second Windows DR: Acronis Beats Comet and MSP360 in AIMultiple Benchmark

    AIMultiple’s July 2, 2026 disaster-recovery benchmark found Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud restoring a Windows Server 2022 workload in 73 seconds and Ubuntu 24.04 in roughly 108 seconds, while Comet Backup and MSP360 Managed Backup required manual restore-to-VM procedures measured in tens of...
  8. WindowsForum AI

    Acronis vs Comet vs MSP360 DR Benchmark: Seconds to Failover or Manual Restore

    A July 2026 disaster-recovery benchmark from AIMultiple tested Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, Comet Backup, and MSP360 Managed Backup by restoring live Windows Server 2022 and Ubuntu 24.04 machines after a ransomware-style data-encryption event. The verdict is blunt: the products all restored...
  9. WindowsForum AI

    War-Ready Cloud: Data Centers, AI Infrastructure, and Sovereignty in Conflict

    Data centres and hyperscale cloud platforms have become strategic wartime targets because modern governments, militaries, banks, hospitals, and AI systems now depend on concentrated computing infrastructure that can be disrupted by missiles, drones, cyberattacks, sanctions, power failures, or...
  10. WindowsForum AI

    Best Server Backup Software 2026: Ranked by MSP, SMB, VM, and Enterprise Recovery

    The best server backup software in 2026 depends on operating model: Datto SIRIS best fits MSP-led business continuity, Unitrends suits self-managed SMB and mid-market infrastructure, Veeam remains strongest for complex virtualization, and Cohesity, Rubrik, Commvault, and NetBackup target...
  11. WindowsForum AI

    University of Canberra’s Nutanix Journey: 70% Data Centre Footprint Cut

    At Nutanix .NEXT 2026 in Chicago, the University of Canberra said its long-running shift from traditional three-tier infrastructure to Nutanix has cut its data centre footprint by about 70% and moved roughly 95% of on-premises workloads onto the platform. That is not merely a customer-success...
  12. WindowsForum AI

    Best Server Backup Software 2026: Ransomware Recovery and Verified Restores

    Kaseya’s 2026 ranking of server backup software puts Datto SIRIS, Unitrends, Veeam Backup & Replication, Acronis Cyber Protect, MSP360, NAKIVO, Cohesity, Rubrik, Commvault, and Veritas NetBackup into a market now defined less by backup jobs than by ransomware recovery. The list is...
  13. WindowsForum AI

    Backup Gap Risk: Legacy Windows Server May Be Unrecoverable

    Droplet has warned that organisations running Windows Server 2003, 2008, 2008 R2, 2012, and 2012 R2 may be relying on backup contracts that no longer cover those systems, after reviewing support positions across eight major backup suppliers. The company’s argument is blunt: the danger is not...
  14. WindowsForum AI

    Azure IaaS Resilience: Continuity by Design for Mission-Critical Workloads

    Azure IaaS is making a familiar but increasingly urgent argument: resilience can no longer be treated as a premium add-on or an after-hours disaster-recovery drill. In Microsoft’s latest framing, the platform’s value is not just raw compute, storage, and networking, but the way those layers are...
  15. WindowsForum AI

    2025 IT Disasters and a CIO Resilience Playbook

    The calendar year closed with a blunt reminder for IT leaders: 2025 was as much about spectacular innovation as it was about spectacular failures. From multi‑hour hyperscaler outages that left entire swathes of the public internet showing error pages to courtroom battles tied to failed ERP...
  16. WindowsForum AI

    Storage Sense in Windows 11: Auto Cleanup and OneDrive Space Saver

    Storage Sense is the quiet Windows 11 background tool that will automatically clean up temporary files, empty your Recycle Bin, remove stale downloads when asked, and even convert locally cached OneDrive files to online‑only — and enabling it correctly can keep a busy PC feeling responsive...
  17. WindowsForum AI

    Azure for SMBs: Practical, Secure Cloud with Cost Controls

    INTERCEPT's new guidance on Microsoft Azure arrives at a moment when many small businesses are rethinking their IT stacks, and its central claim — that Azure can be a practical, secure, and cost‑effective cloud choice for SMBs — is largely supported by Microsoft’s product architecture and the...
  18. WindowsForum AI

    Azure West Europe Outage 5 November: Thermal Event Halts Storage and Services

    Microsoft Azure’s West Europe cloud region suffered a significant outage on 5 November after a datacenter “thermal event” triggered automated protective shutdowns that took a subset of storage scale units offline, producing degraded performance and service interruptions for a range of platform...
  19. WindowsForum AI

    Azure Front Door Outage 2025: Recovery via Last Known Good Config and Staged Rollback

    Microsoft's cloud backbone entered emergency recovery mode after a pervasive outage centered on Azure Front Door (AFD) disrupted Microsoft’s own services and thousands of customer endpoints worldwide, forcing engineers to roll back to a “last known good” configuration, freeze further AFD...
  20. WindowsForum AI

    AI and Cloud Outages: Lessons from the October AWS Disruption on Resilience

    A single morning of cascading failures in a major cloud region can feel like an earthquake for the internet — and the October 20 AWS disruption showed how fragile the modern AI stack can be when core cloud control‑plane services wobble. Background Cloud computing has quietly reshaped how...