Alternating between minimal time, and way too much time waiting this week, with a work-related Disaster Recovery drill. For the company that I work a “real” job for, we perform an annual Disaster Recovery exercise. Basically, we pretend that one of the data centers has been destroyed and no longer available, and attempt to restore all the services at a backup location.
Generally, this is a pretty straightforward effort on my part – we contract with a team that does most of the coordination and I just need to ferry updates to and from the client. This time however we are “cost saving”, meaning I get the fun of doing both.
Thus the effort goes from drastic micro-management when there are activities, to idle and monitoring while we are waiting for longer steps to complete. I can easily work on other things, but I can’t go anywhere, or leave my computer for long, in order to make sure that all the updates are received and acted on quickly. Fun times.
