Everything You Need To Know About Disaster Recovery

One of the major issues that can cause significant damage to any business enterprise is when the server crashes. This can occur because of multiple reasons such as a power outage, human error, hardware failure, etc. Since this can result in a huge data loss, designing a reliable data backup plan for your company might seem like a no brainer. On top of that, there are various digital solutions available these days like the cloud data storage making data backup easier than ever before. Unfortunately, not every backup plan is alike and there are many recovery plans that are not as robust as it ought to be.

For instance, if you are relying on off-site cloud storage or a local backup, it will be sufficient for recovering email data, files, and folders. However, you cannot address the issue of total server loss using this recovery solution. Hence, every business owner is recommended to check their data backup or recovery strategies before a crisis hits. Plus, make sure that your recovery plans are adequate to restore all your data and restore operations as soon as possible. To give you in-depth knowledge about the same, below are some of the major points that you should consider when it comes to your company’s data recovery policy.

Major issues with backup and recovery plans

It’s important to evaluate your backup and recovery plan regularly to ensure that all your company’s significant data is being regularly backed up. Note that, if your storage media has any defects, it’s likely to corrupt the data, which can make it impossible to restore. Testing your backup and recovery plan regularly will let you tackle this issue.

Note that this process will give you an idea of how long it will take to recover your data. Plus, recovery and backup plan evaluation will help you plan things such as how to tackle data loss and how to resume operations as soon as possible. On a related note, it’s better to backup significant data on a nightly basis so that your operations will be down only for a few minutes. Make sure that your company employs skilled technicians who can recover the lost transactions easily.

Besides, keep in mind that data recovery is not just about data but also applications. After all, having robust data backup plans won’t be useful if the application that reads it is not compatible or defective. Note that the chances of compatibility issues will be high when you restore old data. This is due to legal reasons and the analysis process.

How to evaluate your backup and recovery plan

There are numerous ways to evaluate your backup and recovery plan which ranges from going over a checklist of steps to a full-scale simulation. Note that the latter is the best choice. However, conducting the test will be challenging since you’ll have to pull it off without interfering with the normal production activity. Moreover, while backing up and restoring the data is mostly technical, make sure all your employees understand its significance and take the necessary actions when required. Educate them about properly shutting down the applications, how to transfer data from backup the media, restoring lost data, technical methods to restart an application, and resuming the operations as fast as possible.

The backup and recovery plan evaluation process will help your employees ensure that no data or server is excluded from the backup script as well. For this, review a list of all your servers and major file systems. On a related note, your employees may easily add a new server to the network. However, some people may forget to add this to the backup script. A recovery process evaluation will also help you verify that the data you backed up for the specific day is readable and can be located.

Furthermore, ask your staff to note down the time taken to complete major data backup and recovery steps as well as the issues encountered when an application restarts or during file restoration. This will help give you an idea about the weak points in your plan and with similar requests in the future.

Disaster recovery

When it comes to disaster recovery, it’s more complicated than the data backup and recovery process. It is worth noting that you will have to bring up a distinct data center if the disaster is significant. However, it’s critical to load your data and applications to this new server. In simple words, data backup and recovery plan testing is significant to ensure that you are still in business when a disaster hits.

You can either outsource this service or may employ highly skilled technicians in your company. If you are relying on the previous option, make sure that the server backup solution of that particular company features a dedicated local appliance that is easy to deploy. Additionally, ensure that it incorporates cloud backup, local backup, object-level exchange restore, etc. Note that with a combination of cloud and local data backup, you can easily restore the lost data either from your cloud server or from the local device.