Disaster recovery: a plan, not a hope
How you get back to working after a fire, a flood, a theft or an attack — written down before you need it.
Backup is a copy. Recovery is a plan.
Having the data is only half of it. The other half is knowing, in order, what has to happen for the business to be working again: which system comes back first, who does it, where the licence keys are, which supplier has to be called, and how long each step really takes.
Two numbers worth agreeing on
- How much work can you afford to lose? If the last backup was at 2 am and the server dies at 4 pm, you have lost a day of entries. If that is unacceptable, backups need to run more often.
- How long can you afford to be down? Restoring several hundred gigabytes takes real hours. Knowing the number in advance is much better than discovering it during the outage.
What we do with you
- List the systems the business genuinely cannot run without, in priority order
- Agree how much data loss and downtime is tolerable for each
- Write the recovery steps down in a document a stressed person can follow
- Test it, at least once, on something real
Why the written part matters
On the day it happens, the person who knows everything is on leave, unreachable, or the one whose laptop was encrypted. A plan that only exists in somebody head is not a plan.
Building the plan
List what the business cannot run without
In priority order, not alphabetical order.
Agree the two numbers
How much work you can afford to lose, and how long you can afford to be down.
Write the steps down
In language a stressed person can follow at 3 am.
Test it on something real
A plan that has never been run is a draft.
Not sure which plan fits?
Tell us what you need protected — how many machines, how much data, which databases — and we will tell you honestly what it takes.