Backup and disaster recovery
How we approach backups, recovery objectives, and testing so an outage never becomes a crisis.
A backup you've never restored from is a guess, not a safety net. Our approach to backup and disaster recovery is built around one idea: when something fails, you recover quickly and predictably — because the plan was designed and tested in advance.
Backups vs. disaster recovery
They're related but not the same:
- Backup is a copy of your data you can restore from.
- Disaster recovery (DR) is the whole plan for getting operations back after a serious failure — not just data, but systems, access, and the order you bring things back online.
Good backups are necessary for DR, but DR is the bigger picture.
Two numbers that drive the design
Recovery planning starts with two targets, agreed with you:
- RPO (Recovery Point Objective) — how much data, in time, you can afford to lose. An RPO of one hour means backups frequent enough that you'd never lose more than an hour's work.
- RTO (Recovery Time Objective) — how quickly you need to be back up. An RTO of four hours means recovery is designed to complete within four hours.
Tighter targets cost more, so we set them deliberately against what your business actually needs rather than defaulting to "as fast as possible everywhere."
Our principles
- The 3-2-1 idea — multiple copies, on more than one type of media/location, with at least one kept off-site or in the cloud.
- Automated, not manual — backups run on a schedule, not when someone remembers.
- Monitored — a backup that silently stopped working is worse than none, because it breeds false confidence. We alert on failures.
- Tested — we periodically perform real restores, because that's the only way to know recovery actually works and meets the RTO.
Backups you've actually restored from, with a documented recovery time — that's the difference between a bad day and a disaster.
The DR runbook
For systems that warrant it, we produce a written DR runbook: what to do, in what order, who's involved, and how to verify you're back. It turns a high-pressure moment into following a checklist.
Related
Backup and DR are part of how we build and operate infrastructure — see the data center and cloud services pages, or ongoing coverage under Support and AMC.