Ransomware Recovery For Your SQL Server

Will your backup and recovery strategy cover you?

So what about ransomware?  A lot of people are getting hit with ransomware lately. I’ve seen more people lose their systems with ransomware than I have with almost any other type of failure!

Generally, with system failures, when you need to restore from backup, even if you have a lame backup plan, with normal situations, you’ve got something to restore from.

But with ransomware, it usually does a pretty good job of attacking all your backups and making sure that those easy to standard backups have been encrypted the same way that your that your data files or system files get encrypted.

If you are hit with ransomware the things you going to need to look at are:

• Are your local backups good? And the answer to that is usually no with ransomware. Because most of the time ransomware is going to take out those local backups.
• What do you have for off site backups? Hopefully, you’ve been pushing something to Azure or something to Amazon, cloud storage, or somewhere.

Your offsite backup, could even be a hard drive that once a week is taken off site and put in a safe deposit box. That’s kind of an old school way of doing it. But I’ve never known ransomware to be able to attack a data file that’s on an offline hard drive in a safe deposit box.

How can we do the Restore without paying the ransom. I like to do whatever we can, do everything possible to not have to pay the ransom. The ransom often times is $50,000 to $100,000, or even more, depending on the size of your business, and it’s never guaranteed.

A lot of people pay the ransom, and they still never get their data back.

Things to consider:

Do you need to rebuild the entire virtual machine or restore that virtual machine from a backup or a snapshot? And then how do we get the SQL Server databases restored? Because if you are going to restore the VM from a backup need to make sure that we’ve got some SQL server backup files that we can apply on top of that VM, and get the database up to date.

At Stedman Solutions, we can help you with the planning. We have a backup and recovery strategy assessment package that we sell where we help you analyze your needs and come up with plans so that your backups will cover you in these situations.

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