Disaster Recovery Planning

No one is safe from disaster. A disaster can be a fire that burns your company building to the ground, a flood, an earthquake, a major system failure, or even sabotage.

Backing up is not enough to protect yourself from disaster. In the event of a fire or earthquake, having tapes with everything you ever had on the system doesn't do you any good if you don't have a system to restore them to. Therefore, you must devise a safe and sound disaster recovery plan.

A discussion of such a plan (or even a complete definition) is beyond the scope of this book. Firms exist whose primary business is providing a disaster recovery plan for computer users. You should contact one of them immediately.

A well-implemented disaster recovery plan can offer you a replacement system that will be available if your system becomes unusable. The disaster recovery supplier charges a fee for this service, but you can look at it as a form of insurance. The provider works with you and helps you design a good disaster recovery plan.

Tip 

Once you have a plan in place, follow the guidelines religiously and test it thoroughly. Sometimes you think the plan is fool proof, only to later discover holes in it.