Roster a SharePoint farm for DR plan...

Hi guys,

I hope you can shade some light for me in relation to resort a farm from full back up files.

I have “all-in-one “ DB/WEB/SA on SharePoint server 2010. I have PowerShell scripts which back up the farm in a full mode successfully.

From this back up files, I have done a web application restore and everything went OK.

However when I have tried to restore a farm from the full back up I have the following issue:

• Half way through the resorting process, the central admin has become unavailable (to fix this I did iisreset and also had to enter the farm and application pool account manually in the IIS so I can bring my web app working again )
• The Search service application and other service apps now are not working fully. ( Search SA shows as started but the Search topology page  is not loading -  I did try to stop and restart the search instance using PowerShell or stsadm but still no luck.)

I also done research online and found that SA framework doesn’t participate in back up restore- Really!?? – See the blog below:

http://sharepointinterface.com/2010/09/10/configuration-only-backup-and-restore-in-sharepoint-2010/

 Now I have come to the following realisation. Could anyone please help me with the following questions:

1.       Will configure back and restore on SharePoint 2010 (whether using Central Admin or commend lines)  is a good way for disaster recovery  (DR)  plans or testing? If not what would be an altrantive?
2.       If I use  back and restore for my DR plans. Do I need to re-configure all my Service Application from the scratch?

Any advice greatly appreciated.

BalaiP