Disaster Planning

Just as every business needs to plan and budget for future growth, you need to have a plan for dealing with total or partial loss of business data.

In order to determine what provisions to make for partial or complete loss of data, you need to determine the approximate dollar and manpower cost of rebuilding or replacing the data your company uses. You should consider the following questions:

• Do you know the cost of reconstructing your company's financial, personnel, and other business data?
• Do you know if your business insurance would cover any or all of the cost of replacing data?
• Do you know how long it would take to reconstruct your business data? How would this translate into lost future business?
• Do you know the cost per hour of server downtime?

To prevent a natural disaster or sabotage from becoming an even worse financial disaster for your business, test your plan for recovering and restoring your company's critical data. You should keep copies of your disaster recovery plan both on site and off site, and key personnel should consider keeping a copy at home.

Because there are many articles in magazines and entire books that discuss disaster planning and recovery, this section does not go into detail about any aspect of disaster planning. Instead, it describes topics that you should think about in your planning. Your insurance company should also be able to provide you with information to help you.

There are several areas that need to be addressed in developing a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. Some of the topics that you should consider in your disaster planning are also topics that you should follow in your day-to-day operations.

A comprehensive disaster plan should address all of the following issues:

• What data do you need to back up and how often should you do backups?
• Saving critical computer or other hardware configuration information that is not saved during normal tape backups.
• What data needs to stored on site, and how should it be physically stored?
• What data should be stored off site, and how should it be physically stored?
• What training is required so server operators and administrators can respond quickly and effectively if an emergency occurs.

There is more information about each of the preceding topics in this chapter and in Chapter 5, "Preparing for and Performing Recovery."