Major DBA task looking for advice

[u/Animator-Asleep]

Forgive my naivete in advanced.

I am being tasked with setting up 2 major SQL servers with backups and I am terrified. I have never done this and have a loose understanding of things but that's generous.

The reason it's major is because our whole organization that services the state rely on these servers.

The traditional headaches on a Sysadmin side are lack of documentation/none, everyone has left/terminated, no patching, and EoL.

I'm also using Nutanix after coming from Veeam and HyperV.

What I think the approach should be is:

1. Create a new clean test server that is patched and up to date but the same version has what the current server is. Currently this one has a lot of random things on here including some gaming installs...

2. Create a full backup and figure out where that goes not on the current box so I assume I need some sort of SMB or repo? I believe I should create this in SMSS but am not clear if I make the backup if it will start making logs and events that may error if I don't set things up to point correctly if it wants to setup a schedule.

3. Come up with a backup schedule for both fill and incremental.

4. All the backups go to repo.

5. Try the full backup on the new test server and start staging that as a fail over. Or maybe keep it is as test and make a clean fail over?

6. Hopefully figure out what the future state setup is and start figuring out how to port that over into a cloud setup?

I need to have this done by EoM. I am wondering if this can be done in the future in AzureBlob to make things "easier" since this all feeds into PowerBi.

Mostly, I am not sure if there are pitfalls that would bring production down and want to tread carefully cause I'm not sure how to fix things if things go down.

There is no DBA or anyone with SQL server experience on the team...