There is a great saying “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. We all know that prevention is always better than cure. So instead of waiting for the disaster to happen and then planning for the recovery of data is not at all a good idea. Disaster recovery planning should be the first priority for any organization. Similarly if you have been using SharePoint for storing all your crucial information then I hope you must be aware that how critical a data is for any organization. With timely planning you can easily prevent data loss situation from any type of disaster. Now I am going to discuss what factors you should take in to consideration in your Disaster Recovery Plan.
DR: First you need to understand the meaning of disaster recovery. Disaster is that point in the life span of a product when there is unplanned downtime or data loss. So now you know that disaster can also be unnatural in nature like human error. DR is the process of bringing the database back to its normal state in the event of disaster.
Downtime: In DRP you first need to specify that for how long your organization can cope up with unplanned downtime.
Define RTO: Recovery Time Objective(RTO) is define as that duration of time within which a system is brought back in the operational state after a disaster.
Define RPO: Recovery Point Objective(RPO) is define as the acceptable amount of data loss in case of disaster. In simple words it is the time between your most recent(last) backup and disaster.
Prioritize your data: Since DRP is an expensive process therefore you need to decide which data is most important for your organization and which one you can afford to lose. This way you just need to make the DRP only for the data that matters to you. It will save time and money.
Keep your database small: Large size database always create problem as they impact the log size and also take very long time in backup and restore. So keep it small.
DRM: DRM is Disaster Recovery Manager. It is that person who is responsible for bringing the database back to its original state in case of disaster. You should assign a person as DRM according to his skills.
Documentation: It is very important that all your resources should be properly named and well documented otherwise the backup process will become complicated.
Backup strategy: Decide which data you really need to backup and which one you can rebuild manually. The most important things that you should backup in SharePoint 2010 are Content databases, Custom code, Search databases, Configuration databases and Content databases.
Design and test: After knowing all your requirement design your Disaster recovery model. Once model is complete don't leave it like that. Test it properly and redesign it, if required.
What a great program. My company has been looking up information on disaster recovery services ever since the hurricane left us without half of our information last year. We need to make sure that we have this in place before storm season starts up again. Thanks so much for the helpful information.
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