Building Your Disaster Recovery Plan

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Building Your Disaster Recovery Plan
https://www.petri.com/building-disaster-recovery-plan

Posted on April 21, 2017 by Michael Otey in Backup & Storage, Cloud Computing

This new article on http://www.petri.com discusses the importance of Disaster Recovery (D.R.), and its building and testing. It stresses that D.R. covers more than just backups, and reminds that it “can’t be viewed as a set-it-and-forget-it activity. No DR plan is complete without regular testing. If you don’t test your DR plan, you don’t have a real DR plan. The last place you want to find out your DR plan has a problem is in the middle of a critical recovery.”

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Elly, NetDef, ch100, Noel Carboni, MrBrian

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Great subject, Kirsty. I hope it helps a lot of people improve their data security BEFORE the big loss comes.

It’s good to have overlapping redundancy – e.g., multiple different backups.

And don’t forget to think through what KINDS of problems you could have…

Your hardware could be struck by lightning, or you could get malware, or you might accidentally delete files, or a disk could fail, or a software crash could corrupt files, or your computer could be stolen, or you could get an update that makes data inaccessible, or…

Hope for the best, expect things to go wrong occasionally, and plan for the worst.

My systems run 24/7 and do their own scheduled backups every night (and in one case every 3 hours) in addition to the backups I do ad hoc (e.g., with storage that’s normally kept off site). Personally I would not choose to use “cloud” backup, simply because I don’t want my data in someone else’s hands. But it does help protect against problems such as catastrophic site-wide failure.

-Noel

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Elly, JohnW, Kirsty

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Noel Carboni wrote:

Great subject, Kirsty. I hope it helps a lot of people improve their data security BEFORE the big loss comes. It’s good to have overlapping redundancy – e.g., multiple different backups. And don’t forget to think through what KINDS of problems you could have… Your hardware could be struck by lightning, or you could get malware, or you might accidentally delete files, or a disk could fail, or a software crash could corrupt files, or your computer could be stolen, or you could get an update that makes data inaccessible, or… Hope for the best, expect things to go wrong occasionally, and plan for the worst. My systems run 24/7 and do their own scheduled backups every night (and in one case every 3 hours) in addition to the backups I do ad hoc (e.g., with storage that’s normally kept off site). Personally I would not choose to use “cloud” backup, simply because I don’t want my data in someone else’s hands. But it does help protect against problems such as catastrophic site-wide failure. -Noel

Great advice!

I take complete system drive images twice a month.  For the day to day stuff, if I am working on a project, I just set the project folder to a Dropbox folder.  Then every edit that I save is safely backed up to the respective Dropbox cloud folder.

Then I know that if my computer or network ever melted down, I could just head to the nearest Starbucks and resume working from my laptop, with the files safely stored on Dropbox!  🙂

Windows 10 Pro 22H2

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Noel Carboni

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I could post a really huge response to this, there is so much to consider.  But for now I don’t have time to edit a nice article.  This entire topic is the key to my consulting business in Colorado.

Let me leave you all with one thought:  Disaster Recovery plans (as mentioned) are not just about being able to recover/restore all your data.  They’re also about being able to A) avoid downtime entirely through redundant services or B) for smaller budgets to have the ability to QUICKLY restore downed critical services.

At the business level – if your email/applications/internet/servers are down, so are most of the employees that work with you. We call this work stoppage, and it’s considered by many business owners to be at least as important as data retention . . . in some cases, more important!

~ Group "Weekend" ~

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Elly

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