Disaster Recovery Planning
DR plans, runbooks, geographic redundancy, and the 3-2-1 backup rule in practice.
Knowing how to restore a backup is necessary but not sufficient. When a real disaster hits — at 2 AM on a holiday weekend, with the on-call engineer's phone on silent — the difference between a smooth recovery and a catastrophe isn't technical skill. It's planning.
Disaster recovery (DR) planning is the organizational wrapper around your technical capabilities. It answers questions that the technology can't: Who gets called? Who makes decisions? What gets prioritized? How do we communicate with users? When do we escalate?
A team with mediocre backups and an excellent DR plan will outperform a team with excellent backups and no plan every single time.
Anatomy of a DR Plan
A DR plan is a living document that covers five areas:
1. Risk Assessment
Identify what can go wrong a
This lesson is part of the Guild Member curriculum. Plans start at $29/mo.