The Ultimate Disaster Recovery Checklist

The Ultimate Disaster Recovery Checklist

World Backup Day is March 31st, 2018. Take the pledge to backup your data here.



Prepare yourself before disaster strikes. When it comes to data backup and disaster recovery (BDR), being prepared for potential disasters is key to keep your business running. It’s not only important to have a disaster recovery solution you trust, but to make sure you test it as well.





Keep this DR checklist on hand.





Prior to a disaster ever occurring (and unfortunately, it’s a matter of when and not if) ask yourself the following:

• Do you have a disaster recovery solution in place?
• Do you trust it?
• How often do you currently backup these systems?
• When was the last time your backup was tested?
• How long does it take to recover from your current backup solution?
• How long can you realistically be down? 1 hour? 1 day?
• How much production time on your servers are you willing to lose?
• When a disaster occurs, is there an offsite copy?
• How much data is on your critical business systems?
• How many employees would be affected if the critical systems failed?
• What would be the average wage of the affected employees (dollars/hour)?
• What is the overhead cost per hour of the affected employees (dollars/hour)?
• How much revenue would be lost as a result of a system failure (dollars/hour)?
• What is the financial cost of downtime to your business?

The disaster moment has occurred—time to walk through the following steps:





1. Assess the problem and its impact on your business


Every disaster is different. Before doing anything, understand the underlying issue and how it may affect you.

• Is the issue local to one machine, or does it affect your entire system?
• Have files been deleted or are servers/workstations down?

2. Establish recovery goals


Recovery is what makes a BDR solution different from a simple backup product. Plan out your road to recovery.

• Restore the system, the data, or both? Should time be spent recovering files and folders before system recovery?
• Identify critical systems and prioritize recovery tasks.
• What date/time should you recover from?
  • How long can your recovery take?

3. Select the appropriate recovery type(s)


To get to your “road to recovery”, the appropriate recovery procedure must be followed. Think about which approach will best get you to your end goal.

• File restore OR
• Local virtualization OR
• Off-site virtualization

4. Verify the recovery and confirm functionality with users


Once a recovery is verified, confirm that it interacts positively with users.

• Test network connectivity.
• Ensure all users can access resources and applications in the virtual environment.

5. Restore the original system(s), if needed


If the original system(s) needs to be restored, decide which restoration process will work best.

• Bare metal restore OR
• Virtual machine restore

6. Self-assess afterwards


After it’s all said and done, take a step back and think about it: How well did your team do? What could you have done differently?

• What precipitated the failure?
• What ongoing issues need to be addressed?
• What can be done better in future DR scenarios?

Back to view all blog posts