Last Updated on Monday, 28 December 2009 11:51 Wednesday, 20 May 2009 09:20

The effects of NetFu's data center disaster the evening of May 18th were minimized by disaster recovery planning on paper along with regular maintenance including backup checks and SMART drive status checks of all the servers involved.  This was a textbook example of why disaster recovery is so important to every business, even those without their own servers.  Having a good disaster recovery plan on paper is only part of what is necessary to recover from a disaster with minimal downtime and data loss.

A disaster recovery plan that documents all the steps involved in the recovery is a great framework to start with, but more is necessary.  Execution of the disaster recovery plan for best results requires that some steps or dependencies in the plan be tested very often, such as backup and hardware tests.  For servers and user computers included in a disaster recovery plan:

• You should check that backups are happening as expected on at least a monthly basis.
• You should check the SMART health status of all disk drives on at least a weekly basis.
• You should check the environmental status (temperature and humidity) on at least a weekly basis.

The greatest emphasis for small businesses here is that disaster recovery plans must account for all the data important to the business no matter where that data resides, on user computers, internal company servers, or even in the "cloud" .  The goal is to plan for the unexpected, because the unexpected is inevitable.