Disaster Recovery Documentation

Disaster recovery documentation should be a requirement for every project. Regardless of size , an organization should go through the process of contemplating various disaster scenarios and determining what its needs would be in the event of a disaster. A disaster can range from a hard disk failure to a fire that destroys the entire site. Each type of disaster can pose a different threat to the day-to-day functioning of an organization. Therefore, it's important to determine every possible scenario and begin planning ways to minimize the impact of those disasters.

Planning for a disaster can be time consuming and expensive. However, generally speaking this does not outweigh the benefits of creating such documentation. Even a quick analysis showing how downtime resulting from a disaster might affect the company with regard to reputation, time, productivity, expenses, and loss in profit or revenue versus how much time it takes to create documentation can show the advantages of documenting and being prepared. The true purpose for the evaluation, though, is to assist an organization in determining how much should be invested in remedies to avoid or minimize the impact of a disaster.

A number of different components comprise disaster recovery documentation. Without this documentation, full recovery is difficult at best. The following is a table of contents for the areas to consider when documenting disaster recovery procedures:

 Executive Summary or Introduction Disaster Recovery Scenarios Disaster Recovery Best Practices         Planning and Designing for Disaster Business Continuity and Response         Business Hours Response to Emergencies         Recovery Team Members         Recovery Team Responsibilities         Damage Assessment         Off-Hours Response to an Emergency         Recovery Team Responsibilities         Recovery Strategy         Coordinate Equipment Needs Disaster Recovery Decision Tree Software Recovery Hardware Recovery Server Disaster Recovery Preparation         Documentation         Software Management         Knowledge Management Server Backup with NetBackup         Client Software Configuration Restoring the Server         Build the Server Hardware         Post Restore Exchange Disaster Recovery         Disaster Recovery Service Level Agreements         Exchange Disaster Recovery Plan         Exchange Message / Mailbox Restore Scenario         Complete RAID 5 Failure         Complete RAID 1 Failure         NOS Partition Failure         Complete System Failure         NIC, RAID Controller Failures Train Personnel and Practice Disaster Recovery 

Disaster Recovery Planning

The first step of the disaster recovery process is to develop a formal disaster recovery plan. This plan, while time consuming to develop, serves as a guide for the entire organization in the event of an emergency. Disaster scenarios, such as power outages, hard drive failures, and even earthquakes, should be addressed. Although it is impossible to develop a scenario for every potential disaster, it is still helpful to develop a plan to recover from different levels of disaster. It is recommended that organizations encourage open discussions of possible scenarios and the steps required to recover from each one. Include representatives from each department, because each department will have its own priorities in the event of a disaster. The disaster recovery plan should encompass the organization as a whole and focus on determining what it will take to resume normal business function after a disaster.

Backup and Recovery Development

Another important component of a disaster recovery development process is the evaluation of the organization's current backup policies and procedures. Without sound backup policies and procedures, a disaster recovery plan is useless. It is not possible to recover a system if the backup is not valid.

A backup plan does not just encompass backing up data to tape or other medium. It is an overarching plan that outlines other tasks, including advanced system recovery, offsite storage, testing procedures, and retention policies. These tasks should be carefully documented to accurately represent each backup methodology and how it's carried out. Full documentation of the backup process includes step-by-step procedures, guidelines, policies, and checklists.

Periodically, the backup systems should be reviewed and tested , especially after any configuration changes. Any changes to the system should be reflected in the documentation. Otherwise, backup documents can become stale and can add to the problems during recovery attempts.

Recovery documentation complements backup documentation. The primary purpose of the documented backup process is to provide the ability to recover that backup in the event of an emergency. Recovery documentation should outline where the backup data resides and how to recover from various types of failures, such as hard drive failure, system failure, and natural disasters. Just like backup documentation, recovery documentation takes the form of step-by-step procedures, guidelines, policies, and checklists.

Exchange System Failover Documentation

Many organizations use clustering in their Exchange environment to provide failover and redundancy capabilities for their messaging systems. When a system fails over, having fully tested and documented procedures helps get the system back up and running quickly. Because these procedures are not used often, they must be thoroughly tested and reviewed in a lab setting so that they accurately reflect the steps required to recover each system.