Disaster recovery

Disaster recovery is a matter of ensuring that you can help the company recover from any kind of disaster. When preparing for disaster, you need to make sure that your disaster recovery plan includes backup and restore plans, contact information for product vendors, and step-by-step instructions on how to recover each part of your information systems.

The disaster recovery plan should contain detailed steps for recovering from any kind of data loss or physical disaster. The step-by-step plan should contain the location of backup tapes, specify which tapes to restore in different scenarios, and list the steps for rebuilding servers, including detailed information on what to do when a disk fails and how to replace and rebuild the data.

A number of disaster recovery documents overlook key elements such as location of software and CD keys needed to rebuild the system. Be sure that contact information for hardware and software vendors is included in the plan so that if you need to replace an item such as a disk you can contact the vendor.
             Along with detailed recovery steps, a disaster recovery plan should contain detailed information on backup and restore strategies, offsite storage, hot and cold spares, and hot and cold sites.