Chapter 10: What’s Your Disaster Recovery Plan?

Series: The Definitive Guide Series

Author: Don Jones

ISBN: pending

Much of this book has focused on backup and restore rather than disaster recovery. The difference? I regard “restoring” as something you do with a single file, or a group of files, or a single email message, or an entire mailbox—something less than an entire server. It might be a “disaster” that a file was accidentally deleted, but it’s typically a disaster for one or two people—not the entire business. A true disaster, in my view, is when an entire server goes down—or worse, when an entire data center is affected.

The reason much of this book has focused on restores is that, frankly, it’s what we spend more time doing. It’s not all that common for an entire server to fail, or for an entire data center to encounter a disaster. It definitely happens, but what happens a lot more is someone needing you to pull a single file or mailbox from backups.
In this chapter, however, I’m going to focus entirely on disaster recovery. Disasters do happen – floods, hurricanes, power surges, and so forth can take out entire servers or even entire data centers. One time, I had to deal with a complete week-long power outage when someone ran their pickup truck into the transformer on the corner of our office’s property—talk about a disaster. In fact, I’ll use that story as a kind of running example of where Backup 1.0 really let me down.

We’re going to stick with our Backup 2.0 manifesto because it’s just as applicable to disaster recovery as it is to a single-file recovery:
Backups should prevent us from losing any data or losing any work, and ensure that we always have access to our data with as little downtime as possible.