2. Disaster Recovery is 'make or Break'
Research shows that most firms hit by a catastrophic
event, without no disaster recovery plan, go out of
business within two years. Even a basic disaster
recovery plan will increase the chances of recovery.
3. Disaster Recovery Tips
1. Store your system passwords in at least two
separate secure locations. only one of which is in
the same building as your IT equipment. At least
two staff have should have access to them.
2. Document, document, document! Make sure that the
whole recovery process to get you up and running
again is documented, and includes the locations of
system recovery and other critical discs. Make sure
that key staff are familiar with these.
4. 3. Establish an automated system to notify critical
staff of disaster by text. These staff should be
thoroughly trained so that they can perform basic
disaster recovery/back-up tasks unsupervised. You
may be able to do this through an arrangement
with a third-party service provider.
5. 4. Practice your disaster recovery plan on a
quarterly basis or more. This not only hones your
disaster recovery team's skills but it will also
familiarize new staff with the procedure, and
ensures that your disaster recovery strategy is kept
up to date by revealing any issues with new
equipment or software.
6. 5. No matter how good your disaster recovery plan,
it cannot recover data if you neglect to back it up.
Make sure there is a routine for backing up data
regularly, and ensure it is done. Using at least
Raid Level 5 (Raid Level 10 if the budget allows)
to ensure data duplication ensures fault tolerance.
Build as much redundancy in your system as
possible to remove any single points of failure.
This includes a multi-path data route to the system,
so that you can still access your data if one path
fails.
7. 6. Arrange to have spare hot hard disk drives already in
the system, or at least physically available in the same
room as your storage system.
7. A tape archive strategy is crucial. Tapes used on a
daily basis should be replaced every six to nine
months to avoid deterioration - backups are no use if
they cannot be recovered. Other tapes should be
replaced on a regular, less frequent, schedule based
on the frequency of use. Being able to back up to a
remote location is worth almost any price, a fireproof
vault is not an alternative to an off-site location.
8. 8. Get yourself the best, longest-life, most uninterruptible
power supply you can. Then get an additional battery
back-up for your cache to go with it.
9. Don't neglect to protect yourself from random theft,
vandalism and employee malice, they can be just as
disastrous as anything else. At the very least ensure
that the door to your data/server room is locked, day
and night.
10. An automatically closing fire door to the data/server
room will keep fire and smoke out of the room for a
surprisingly long time
9. Common Faults in Disaster Recovery Plans
Most disaster recovery plans that fail do so from
lack of backups, lack of practice, or lack of
documents. A basic but documented plan with recent
backups and practiced staff will work better than a
grandiose scheme let down on any of these points.
10. THE END!!!
More tips at
http://free-backup.info/
Belle.2011
