Do not call anything Backup!
Leaving aside the obvious management foo bar of increasing this quarters profits by sacking your most experienced staff, and, the pervasive incompetence which results from publicly announcing you hate your staff.
Even for a well run site having a 'Backup' anything is asking for trouble.
As soon as something is declared as the backup it gets ignored, testing is skimped, fixes are missed and switch over procedures go stale.
What to do -- run without backups?
No you call one site 'Red', ' South', and the other site 'Blue', 'North' or some similar name of equal semantic value.
The during the time of your lowest load (say second Sunday in the month) you switch from one site to the other -- every month!
There are numerous advantages to doing it this way.
-- Your staff no how to switch over 'cos they do it every month.
-- procedures are kept up to date and regularly streamlined.
-- Small faults and glitches are found as they happen, not the tsunami of bugs which have accumulated since the last switch-over two years ago.
The other advantage is it simplifies maintenance and upgrades.
You apply changes to the dormant site and they take effect on switch over.
If all is well you can then apply the changes to the newly dormant site, if, not
you switch back and try again next month.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
