Planning for Disaster Recovery

The most valuable part of your computer system is not the hardware or the software, but what you, or your staff or family have created. People often spend a lot of time creating data with their computers, but often neglect to think about how to secure it in case of disaster. A warranty will not cover you if you fail to back up your data. If the worst happens, are you prepared?

A disaster can range from a damaging internet born worm to theft, to fire, to simple user error, and you should be prepared for all eventualities.

Backup is one of the most important parts of preparing for disaster recovery. As part of any backup policy, you need to decide what the maximum downtime and recovery cost you can tolerate is. If you are a home or small business user, simply backing up your documents, databases and email may be adequate, and for this purpose a CD writer may be perfectly adequate. Allow for the fact that it may cost time and money to reinstall software on your computer, and you may be out of action for several days if your computer is completely destroyed, eg by fire or theft.

To allow for disasters like fire, you should be prepared to keep important data off site, or in a secured location that will not be affected if anything happens to your computing environment. Bear in mind privacy implications if you work with sensitive data about other people. If you simply copy files to a CD-ROM or CD-RW and store it at a friend's or neighbour's house, you could be in breach of the Privacy Act, if someone loads a sensitive CD into their computer.

Ideally any sensitive data should be encrypted, so if it falls into the wrong hands, for whatever reason, it cannot be accessed. If you do this, ensure you have the encryption keys and passwords necessary to restore the data at a later time if required!

If you have too much data to fit on CD, you may find a DVD recorder is more suitable. This can store around eight times as much data, and is quite reasonably priced.

If you need complete system backup, and high availability as in the case of a server, you should consider hot swappable hard drives, and a tape backup system. This will be expensive, but you need to compare this against the cost of downtime if you don't have a backup system.

While backup is an important aspect of disaster recovery, you also need to take into account who will provide you with IT support, and how quickly you can replace equipment in case of a failure. New PCs come with warranties, but even the so-called on site warranty may not cover forward replacement of faulty parts, and if you have to wait several weeks for repairs or replacement, this may be unacceptable, but may be perfectly within the terms of the warranty. If you need rapid replacement, ask about options to provide you with forward replacement, and quick exchange of faulty equipment. You will most likely have to pay a premium for this, so you should budget carefully and compare this against the cost of downtime.

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