Disaster Recovery Plan DRP

A disaster recovery plan is a short written answer to one question. The office floods, the server dies, or a virus locks every file at nine in the morning. What happens next, and who does it?

The plan starts with two numbers, and you decide them before anything breaks. The first is how many hours the business can be shut without real harm. For a clinic that books patients all day it might be two hours. For a builder's office it might be two days. The second is how much work you can afford to lose. If the copy is made every night, a failure at four in the afternoon costs you a whole day of orders. Say the 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 decide what you buy. Nobody needs a second server humming in another city if a day offline is survivable. But if an hour is the limit, an overnight copy will not deliver it, and no supplier can pretend otherwise. Linkysoft asks for those two numbers before it quotes anything, because they change the price more than any feature does.

The rest is names and steps. Who declares that this is a real emergency. Who calls the hosting company and who calls the staff. Where the phone numbers are kept when the email is down, on paper, because that is the day nobody can log in. And what the shop tells customers while it waits.

Then comes the part almost nobody does. Restore the files for real, onto a spare machine, and time 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 is older than anyone thought, or the restore takes eleven hours instead of two. Linkysoft runs that rehearsal twice a year during a security review, and builds the recovery steps into every custom business system it delivers, so the answer is written down before the day it is needed.