After the pass of the hurricaine Wilma that passed through florida, we had the problem of that we didn't had no electricity at the office for more than a week. We had to take the server and a couple of workstations to my house and keep working at the house until the power was restablished.

So you would imagine what hustle was that, and the thing is that this recent experience made me think that we don't have the proper recovery plan for a disaster.

Yes we have the rigorous backups which the tapes are kept in the same site. But the biggest problem is that the nature of the bussines it cannot be out of work for more than 48 hours.

I was discussing with my partners the situation and we thought about having a copy of the backups in a different site, or maybe do a schedule sinc with an outside server in regurlar basis so that we could have the information somewhere else, in case that we have a disastrous experience again.

But i don't know right now i'm quite confused what to do, in this case. Technologicaly speaking i need to have a recent copy of data in a different site, that in a recovery i can put the company to produce in no more than 24 hours.

Any suggestions or ideas that you would like to discuss about this will be greatly appreciated.

PD: i thing this topic belongs more to a blog, but i believe there's a lot of bright people in linuxquestions.org

"Yes we have the rigorous backups which the tapes are kept in the same site. But the biggest problem is that the nature of the bussines it cannot be out of work for more than 48 hours."

Tapes are an easy way to backup. You just put in the tape and let her roll. But tapes are a slow, awkward way of recovery. If you want to speed up your recovery I suggest that you back up to hard drives and carry the hard drives off site. And stay away from RAID. RAID is similar to tapes in that it is simple to create backups and awkward to recover.

To generalize on my thought, we often get questions on LinuxQuestions about quick and easy ways to backup. Your question is the first that I have seen about the coresponding question of how to quickly and easily recover using the backup.

"I was discussing with my partners the situation and we thought about having a copy of the backups in a different site, or maybe do a schedule sinc with an outside server in regurlar basis so that we could have the information somewhere else, in case that we have a disastrous experience again."

Another recovery problem is what hardware to run on. This question is usually brushed off with, "Oh, we'll go down the road to XYZ company. They have hardware similar to ours so we can buy time from them." The fallacy in this thinking is that no company has a lot of capacity sitting around unused. That is a waste of money. So when you go to XYZ company you will find that you can only get a small fraction of their capacity and you are low man on the priority totem pole.

"We had to take the server and a couple of workstations to my house and keep working at the house until the power was restablished."

That is obviously a good solution. It begs the question about what to do when your hardware is wiped out. The best solution from a recovery standpoint is to have an idle off-site capacity which is enough to run your critical applications. That is expensive.

Obviously my thoughts don't lead to a definite conclusion. Would other people like to chime in?

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Steve Stites

RAID isn't a backup solution, its a redundancy solution. RAID isn't just difficult to 'recover' - it provides absolutely no protection of data or backup at all . There's no reason to stay away from RAID, its almost necessary if you want reliable servers, but its a completely seperate thing from whatever backup solutions you consider.

I believe that the discussion is not only about a backup solution, i believe this more of a business decision regarding IT topics. And with the right brainstorm is possible to have a good documentation of the topic, that i'm very sure i won't be the only one with circumstances like this.

Yes having a second server in a different site will be the ideal solution, but how will i maintain the live copies in both server?. and i think this will be the center of the discussion.