SQL Server › Always On Availability Groups

How would you plan a disaster recovery strategy that combines Always On Availability Groups across multiple data centers with regular backups?

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Answer

You would configure a local synchronous replica for immediate automatic failover during common hardware failures, an asynchronous replica in a geographically distant data center to protect against a full site disaster, and continue taking regular backups of the primary database as an additional layer of protection against issues like accidental data corruption that replication alone cannot fix.

-- Local replica: synchronous commit, automatic failover
-- Remote replica: asynchronous commit, manual failover
-- Backups still run independently on a regular schedule

Real-world example A multinational retailer keeps a synchronous replica in the same city for fast automatic failover during routine outages, an asynchronous replica in another country for full disaster recovery, and nightly backups to guard against data corruption that could otherwise replicate across both live copies.

Common follow-ups: Why are backups still necessary even with a well configured availability group?;How do you test that a disaster recovery failover plan actually works before a real emergency happens?

Backup & Recovery;SQL Server Architecture & Editions