How to Set Up Disaster Recovery
Design and implement a disaster recovery plan for your application with defined RPO, RTO, and tested failover procedures.
What You'll Learn
This advanced-level guide walks you through how to set up disaster recovery step by step. Estimated time: 16 min.
Step 1: Assess risks and requirements
Identify potential disaster scenarios and define acceptable Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective for each system.
Step 2: Design the DR architecture
Plan standby infrastructure in a separate region with database replication, DNS failover, and data synchronization.
Step 3: Implement data replication
Set up cross-region database replication, file storage synchronization, and configuration mirroring for your DR environment.
Step 4: Build failover procedures
Create automated and documented manual failover procedures with runbooks that any team member can execute.
Step 5: Test regularly
Schedule quarterly DR drills including full failover tests, restore verification, and procedure documentation updates.
Frequently Asked Questions
What RPO and RTO should I target?▾
For most SaaS apps, target RPO under 1 hour and RTO under 4 hours. Critical financial systems need RPO under 1 minute and RTO under 15 minutes.
How much does disaster recovery cost?▾
A warm standby DR setup costs 30-50% of primary infrastructure. Pilot light approaches cost 10-20%. Factor in the cost of downtime when evaluating DR investment.
How often should I test DR?▾
Test failover procedures quarterly, restore from backups monthly, and update runbooks after every infrastructure change. Untested DR plans fail when needed most.