Disaster recovery (DR) is the documented strategy and set of procedures for restoring IT systems, data and operations after a serious disruption such as a site outage, ransomware attack or major data loss.
Why it matters
High availability handles small failures automatically, while disaster recovery handles events large enough to take out whole systems or sites. A DR plan defines what to restore, in what order, how quickly, and who does it.
It is measured by two targets: how much data you can lose (RPO) and how long you can be down (RTO). A plan that has never been rehearsed is only a guess.
Example
A company replicates its database to another region every 5 minutes and keeps infrastructure code in version control. After a regional outage, it deploys the stack in the second region and switches DNS, restoring service in under an hour.
Common mistakes
- Writing a plan and never running a restore test.
- Storing backups and runbooks in the same location that might be lost.
- Forgetting dependencies such as DNS, secrets and third-party accounts.
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