Disaster Recovery

Suppose a natural disaster strikes your office – are your records safe? If you sold your practice or moved to a new location, how would you preserve your files? Proactively planning for data recovery is key for any organization to avoid catastrophic loss.

Disaster recovery is a plan for re-establishing or reproducing computer operations after a catastrophic event, such as a fire or earthquake. It may include routine off-site backup as well as a procedure for re-activating necessary information systems.

With proper planning, you can recover from a variety of problems, which fall into two main categories of threat:
  • Accident: any unforeseeable event, natural disaster, hardware malfunction, or innocent user error
  • Intentional act: a deliberate, malicious intrusion causing system damage, such as a corrupt file, virus, or worm received over email, or damage caused by a hostile individual.
Whatever the cause, the effects of temporary data loss can range from stressful to devastating. You can lessen this impact and prevent the damage from becoming permanent by implementing a data protection strategy that includes a backup and restoration plan.

You may wish to modify the plan suggested here to best suit your needs, but the following is a reasonable routine to adequately safeguard your data with minimal impact on your workload. There are two main components: a frequent local backup and an occasional off-site backup.

Next, we will review the basic steps of each of these scheduled backups.