Disaster Recovery
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Disaster recovery (DR) is your plan for when everything goes absolutely wrong — data center floods, region-wide outage, ransomware attack. It's the 'break glass in case of emergency' playbook. How fast can you get back online (RTO)? How much data can you afford to lose (RPO)? If you don't have a DR plan, your DR plan is 'panic.'
Real Talk
Disaster Recovery encompasses the policies, tools, and procedures for recovering technology infrastructure and data after a catastrophic event. Key metrics are RTO (Recovery Time Objective — how fast) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective — how much data loss). Strategies range from backup-and-restore (cheapest, slowest) to multi-region active-active (expensive, fastest).
When You'll Hear This
"Our DR plan guarantees 4-hour RTO and 1-hour RPO." / "We test disaster recovery quarterly — you don't want to discover your backups don't work during an actual disaster."
Related Terms
Backup
A database backup is a saved copy of your data at a specific point in time.
RPO (Recovery Point Objective)
RPO is how much data you can afford to lose in a disaster, measured in time. If your RPO is 1 hour, your backups need to run at least every hour.
RTO (Recovery Time Objective)
RTO is how long you can afford to be down after a disaster. If your RTO is 4 hours, you need to be back online within 4 hours of failure.