how often is backup and disaster recovery active
Natural Disasters

When companies purchases a disaster recovery plan, how often do they put the service in use? Although this may seem like an odd or misplaced question, it’s one that businesses often ask themselves before purchasing a service.

The seemingly right answer is that DR is only active when actually restoring information. Businesses then have a hard time justifying the service, since they think their money could be better used for a service that they could use more frequently.

The first problem with this thought process is that it’s completely false. Disaster recovery doesn’t just deal with data recovery but also with data backup. And any good disaster recovery plan will have enough scheduled backups to ensure that in case anything happens, the company wouldn’t lose too much data that was produced during the period between the last backup and the recovery.

According to a recent Cloud Tweaks article, disaster recovery may not be continuously active, but it is active frequently throughout the week:

“One popular misconception about DR in general is that it only becomes active during a recovery. But this is only the case for enterprises that view DR as an afterthought. A properly managed DR infrastructure incorporates a wide variety of daily, weekly, monthly and semi-annual procedures involving backup, replication, system maintenance, integration with primary infrastructure and so on. As well recovery drills and mock scenarios should have a place in every DR program.”

Companies should schedule their data backups to happen either weekly or daily in order to protect their information. This explains why disaster recovery is active more than inexperienced users would think.

In addition, the idea of disaster recovery isn’t to let the user know when it’s active. Simple notifications are appreciated, but mostly, managers just want to set up their data backup schedule and forget about it altogether. If the service is reliable, then when they need to access it, it will be ready at a moment’s notice.

If you would like more information about disaster recovery, contact us.

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