Disaster Recovery Planning Includes Ensuring That Data Can Be Recovered

The moment you experience an outage or loss of data is not the time to wonder whether your disaster recovery solution will work. As with anything that protects the lifeblood of your business, you need to know it will work.

To ensure you have a proven process for protecting your company’s data, you’ll want to know a few key bits of information.

With a clear understanding of these three areas, you can start to put together a test plan for how to make sure you are prepared for worst-case scenarios.

Swedish economist Thomas Sterner said, “Everything in life worth achieving requires practice.” This is certainly true when it comes to disaster recovery. To get the best results, you must practice. This means having a working knowledge of how to perform different types of recovery, from a single file to the entire environment. It also includes knowing where the data resides, how users access it and what the data represents to the business. This will help you prioritize what gets protected and in what way.

With backup, you can never be too careful or methodical in how you deploy, monitor and test your backup solution. Each of these tasks will be the building blocks of your data protection plan, and the tool you use in the event you need to recover your data, application or server.

With backup, you need to test the recovery process as if an event is happening. When testing the restoration of your most critical data, it’s helpful to have a recovery environment so you can verify functionality of the environment once it is restored. The recovery environment can be at scale or pared down to fit what you’re testing.

If the solution you use has an instant recovery option for virtual environments, you need to make sure to test that, as well. Knowing this will save you time in the recovery process and simplify the recovery of your infrastructure.

Here is a list of tests to run with your backup solution:

Last, but not least, make sure to establish a regular testing schedule, ideally once a quarter. More frequently is even better.

Without regular testing, you’ll never be confident in your disaster recovery preparedness. If you can’t trust in your ability to bounce back from disruptions, you could suffer catastrophic consequences in the form of financial setbacks, damaged relationships and diminished reputation. Carbonite gives you the tools you need to protect data, with options for disaster recovery testing that builds confidence in your ability to prevent major disruptions to your business.

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