please tell me if this thinkin is correct, if not, please corret me:
disaster recovery means when something bad happens and you need to retrieved a backed up file, all you have to do is cd into the tape drive and then look for the file you want and extract it from the drive.
is this correct??
please people, help me
We lost a fairly large computer center in the World Trade Center disaster. The services that it provided were back on the air within 12 hours. And we didn't lose a byte of data.
That's what disaster recovery is. It's very hard and very expensive.
Disaster recovery can be anything from rebuilding a single server to rebuilding a complete data center or business. The biggest part of it (IMO) is the planning of what you will do.
Most IT folks know or have planned how to rebuild a server lost due to any number of reasons (fire, storm, electrical outage). D/R is knowing what you will do if a particular server is down, a particular network is down, a particular site is down....on and on until you know what you are doing from the smallest problem to the biggest (like the WTC).
I don't think many IT folks really had planned for a WTC type disaster. I think it was a great effort by those involved to get the services back SO fast.
Do a search on D/R on the web - there is loads of information to learn more.
IT disaster recovery plans, programs and investments are directly proportional to the degree of risk when the IT systems are down.
Banks, brokers, insurance companies and other similar financial-releated firms tend to have very well financed and supported disaster recovery programs because their entire business is IT related (after all, money is simply numbers in computers, very little cash or other material is actually stored or transferred).
So, in a nutshell, disaster recovery is also known (in some circles) as business continuity planning (in the event of a disaster) and the metric is how fast business can continue in the event of a failure, series of failures, etc.
This can involve setting up IT computing and data centers in other parts of the world (in the event of nuclear attack on a nation!), setting up similar centers in cities a few miles away (in the event of fire or flood), or simply doing back ups on some reliable storage media.
The plans are completely dependent on the degree of risk to life or property (money) to the business (or mission) if the systems are lost.
Disaster recovery is a subset of the overall IT security umbrella known as 'operational risk managment'... where risks are managed with various compensating controls. The controls can be technical, but are also based on policy and business process, insuring insurance coverage, business continuity processes, etc.