Restore to different server?

[cjstone]

I've been asked to help with the BCP (Business Continuity Planning) for our Zimbra systems and have an initial question I'm hoping I can get some help with here.

We have two offices on opposite coasts. Each coast has a zimbra machine running as mta and mailstore. The west coast machine is the ldap master, the east coast is a replica (connected via 6megabit MPLS).

Should one of the offices disappear, we want to restore that coast's accounts and mailstore to the remaining office.

We back up /opt/zimbra/backups to tape and cross-ship weekly offsite copies between the coasts. We will be increasing this frequency at some point, but for now, worst case scenerio is we'll have week old backups to restore from.

In any case, my question is this:

Given we have the downed server's /opt/zimbra/backups restored somewhere on the remaining server, say /opt/zimbra/backups2, could we just restore those accounts into that remaining server, thereby merging them in with the existing accounts? Or would it be wiser to just build a new Zimbra box in the remaining office and do a disaster recovery restore to it?

Thanks for any suggestions...

--Chris