Checklist of Tips for Your Disaster Recovery Plan

Disasters are bound to happen. They come without any prior notice or invitation and can be very deadly and devastating. Any organization that hopes to survive through a ransomware attack, with no amount of data loss, cannot do so without a backup and disaster recovery plan in place.

However, setting up a disaster recovery plan is not enough. Although it helps but it is also important that it is effective and dependable.

Disaster Recovery for Unpredictable Natural Disasters

Natural disasters can be very unpredictable, such as earthquakes, tsunamis and volcano eruptions, can cause as much damage as predictable disasters. This is why you, as a business owner, must be ready for such events, especially if you live or work in the areas where theses disasters are pretty common. can be of great use to do effective data backups.

In these situations, it is recommended to back up the systems and data more frequently than ever. There is no need to change the backup technology or the backup method but it is best advised to revise the frequency of the backups.

For instance, if you perform incremental backups once or twice a day and perform full backups every week, then it would make more sense to pump up those numbers and increase the incremental backups to hourly backups.

Let's look at some of the guidelines for setting up a reliable and effective backup and disaster recovery plan.

These are some of the necessary precautions as a natural disaster can occur at any time so it is best to be prepared for it.

Backup & Disaster Recovery Guidelines

Here is a checklist of all the things that your disaster recovery plan needs to have so that it can save your data in the event of a disaster.

Locate data backup resources in an area which is geographically distant from your primary office. This is usually a cloud based service which is being offered by many vendors.

If you back up your data locally then it is time to stop. Move to cloud backups as they are more secure and reliable in case a natural disaster strikes. This is because as compared to tape backups they are not physically present on-site, which mean they cannot be damaged in a disaster.

Increase the backup frequency of your critical data to hourly backups and leave the less critical data to weekly backups.

If you are already using cloud based services like software as a service or disaster as a service, then it is best to reexamine your systems and see if there are any potential improvements which can be made.

Review your RTOs and RPOs and make sure they are feasible in a way that they can compete with the severity of the natural disasters. In other words, make sure they are as low as possible.

Examine your network. Make sure that it has the required amount of bandwidth necessary for efficient recovery from cloud backups.

Regularly test your backup plan and look for any errors you may face during testing and resolve them as soon as possible to ensure smooth recovery of data at the time of actual recovery.

Conclusion Natural Disasters are inevitable. Setting up a backup and disaster recovery plan helps greatly but it needs to be efficient and reliable also. The said guidelines offer all the tips necessary to make a backup and disaster recovery plan as efficient and reliable and can reshape the DR plan of an organization.