Disaster Recovery Plan DRP

A disaster recovery plan is a short written answer to a single question, and the question is what happens on the worst morning of the year. The office floods, or the server dies, or a virus locks every file at nine o'clock. What happens next, and who is the person who does it?

The plan starts with two numbers, and you decide them long before anything breaks. The first is how many hours the business can be shut without real harm. A clinic booking patients all day might survive two hours, while a builder's office can lose two days and barely feel it. The second number is how much work you can afford to lose. If the copy is only made at night, a failure at four in the afternoon costs you a whole day of orders. So say both numbers out loud, agree them with the people who will feel the loss, and write them at the top of the page.

Those two numbers then decide what you actually need to buy. Nobody needs a second server humming away in another city if a day offline is survivable. But if an hour is the limit, an overnight copy will never deliver it, and no supplier can honestly pretend otherwise. That is why Linkysoft asks for both numbers before quoting anything, because they change the price more than any feature does.

The rest of the plan is simply names and steps. Someone has to declare that this is a real emergency, and someone else has to call the hosting company while a third person calls the staff. The phone numbers belong on paper, because the day the email dies is the day nobody can log in to look them up. The plan should also say what the shop tells customers while it waits.

Then comes the part almost nobody does, which is restoring the files for real onto a spare machine and timing it with a clock. That test is the only proof the plan works, and it usually fails the first time. A password is missing, or the copy turns out older than anyone thought, or the restore takes eleven hours instead of two. Linkysoft runs that rehearsal twice a year as part of a security review. It also builds the recovery steps into every custom business system it delivers, so the answer is written down long before the day anyone needs it.