Disaster Recovery Plan

ZanthianZanthian Mitey Worrier Icrontian
edited May 2005 in Science & Tech
Hello everyone Again,

I am in the process of developing a disaster recovery plan for a small company <100 employees and need some advice.

Have you ever writen a Disaster Recovery Plan?
Does anyone have advice to pass along in developing a plan?
Do you have an example you would be willing to share or know of an example online that you can link too?
What value did you gain from having a plan in place when something went wrong?

Thanks again guys!

P.S. this might be in the wrong board, it isn't hardware or software. Feel free to move it to the appropriate area. :)

Comments

  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited May 2005
    Depends on your setup and how complex it is. I have worked on jobs where they had servers sitting offsite ready to be deployed if the friggin building burned to the ground. The backups were taken offsite and restored to the offsite servers EVERY NIGHT.

    But we estimated the company would lose a hundred grand a day if we were down. They planned for the majority of critical employees to work from home via VPN connections and everything. They actually had a core team in charge of such things and they were live tested by basicaly calling the team lead at midnight twice a year and painting a scenario... Ok the main Financial server is down. Totaly mucked. What do you do. You gotta be live by 8:00 in the morning no matter what...And they get up and go to work. Proving their "plan" that is in place is sound.

    Your plan hopefully will be much smaller in scope.

    If your in charge of backups I will give you one piece of advice that if you follow it will save your butt over and over. No backup is worth crap if you are not regularly testing it. I mean move the data aside and restore. Stuff changes. Stuff moves around. New hardware gets added.. permisions change.... Especially at times with big databases. MAKE SURE your really getting everything backed up and it will restore it correctly in a emergency.

    I can't tell you how much money I have made off clients that had bad backups. Bad backup plans etc... Sometimes the backup script has actually been giving errors for months and the nitwit backing it up just keeps feeding it tapes each day ignoring the errors.

    Most companies could not survive a major data loss.

    The look on peoples faces when a drive crashs and you put a new one in and say Ok hand me last nights backup. You will be good to go in a hour or so.. And they look at you with deer in the headlights look and say "What if I didnt backup LAST NIGHT". And I say let me rephrase that. "Hand me your last good backup tape". And they say Gee I meant to order more tapes... YadaYadayada... last backup was at months end... last month....

    And you gotta shake your head and say "then get a team ready to start re-entering all your companies financial transactions from hardcopy covering the last 26 days you numbnuts".

    And yes I have had to say this twice in 24 years.

    Tex
  • sfleurietsfleuriet Texas New
    edited May 2005
    omfg tex- where did you work and where do you work now?!!
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited May 2005
    I have been a management consultant since 1981 in Dallas. Been in this buisness since around 1977 writing custom software. I started and owned my own buisness writing custom software and selling computer systems in the late 80's up in the Aspen CO area. Moved back to Texas around 1993 and worked as a contractor writing software or working as a project manager/analyst mostly, but actually doing a wide variety of computer related work. Basicaly doing anything you could pile enough green dead presidents high enough to get my attention. My wife Robin and I tried to take jobs where we would work together on projects. She is an Oracle database expert.

    Right now I am working for a computer consulting firm in Denver Colorado that specializes in document management software and I live just North of CO Springs.

    Tex
  • ShortyShorty Manchester, UK Icrontian
    edited May 2005
    Tex wrote:
    Depends on your setup and how complex it is. I have worked on jobs where they had servers sitting offsite ready to be deployed if the friggin building burned to the ground. The backups were taken offsite and restored to the offsite servers EVERY NIGHT.

    But we estimated the company would lose a hundred grand a day if we were down. They planned for the majority of critical employees to work from home via VPN connections and everything. They actually had a core team in charge of such things and they were live tested by basicaly calling the team lead at midnight twice a year and painting a scenario... Ok the main Financial server is down. Totaly mucked. What do you do. You gotta be live by 8:00 in the morning no matter what...And they get up and go to work. Proving their "plan" that is in place is sound.

    Company I work for uses exactly that principal. Overkill...?? No way :)
  • sfleurietsfleuriet Texas New
    edited May 2005
    oh cool tex- i have an aunt that lives up there in Littleton
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