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Disaster Recovery

By Jason Kato | April 25, 2007

QUESTION:
I’m not sure how long it would take for our computer systems to recover from a disaster. I’m always hearing about Disaster Recovery but I’m not sure what would be necessary to protect my business in case we had a disaster. Can you shed some light on Disaster Recovery for my computer systems?

ANSWER:
This will be a brief description on Disaster Recovery because there have been volumes of books written on the subject. The first step is Backup. Ensure that your backup (either tape or disk) is being done correctly and that the process is verified periodically (once per quarter) to ensure that the Backup and subsequent Recovery Process is working. The next step is Offsite Storage. Make sure that a copy of your Backup is stored offsite in another location, consistently. The third step depends upon your Business Recovery Plan.

A Disaster Recovery Plan should be a subsection of your overall Business Recovery plan. If your Business Recovery Plan requires no down time then you’ll need to create another location that can immediately be activated in case of an emergency. This isn’t realistic for most small businesses but you’ll still need to decide how long you can afford to be down.

If the requirement is hours to a few days then you may still need to have access to another site to recover your systems from your backups in offsite storage to another probably rented location. If your Business Recovery requirement is a week or longer then you can expedite the new servers and computers through almost any vendor.

Thanks for the wonderful question!

Sid Kato
President and CEO
Array Systems - LA’s Go To Computer Experts

Topics: Disaster Recovery |