Understanding the basics of disaster recovery

Disaster recovery is a set of tools, policies, and procedures that help us while recovering our systems after a disastrous event. DR is just a subset of a more complex discipline called business continuity planning, where more variables come into place and you expect more sophisticated plans on how to recover the business operations. With careful planning, you can minimize the effects of the disaster – however, you must keep in mind that it's nearly impossible to completely avoid disasters. Such a set of tools, policies, and procedures would be used, for example, during natural disasters when your data center or site of operations is compromised. Another great example that's very relevant today is all kinds of cyberattack, where your infrastructure may be compromised.

The main goal of a DR plan is to minimize the downtime of our service and to minimize data loss. To measure these objectives, we use special...