Planning Disaster Recovery

A disaster recovery plan is necessary to ensure all systems and data can be quickly restored if a disaster occurs. It is important to determine and prepare for all the steps required to respond to each type of disaster, and to test the recovery steps by simulating a catastrophic event. A disaster recovery plan can be structured in many different ways and can contain many types of information,
and can include the following:

• Information on who owns the administration of the plan.

• A list of people to be contacted if there is a disaster and instructions on how to contact them.

• A list of potential disasters and a checklist for recovery from each disaster scenario.

• Procedure for performing backups.

• Off-site storage policies.

• Procedures for restoring servers and the network.

• A plan to obtain hardware, if it is necessary.

• How long recovery will take and the final database state the users can expect.

• Steps for reviewing the documentation whenever changes are made to the computers or network.

Regards,
Hossein Karimi