Today we await the arrival of a 100 year storm that threatens to surge New York harbor and the Long Island Sound by 6-11 feet!
In light of Hurricane Sandy barreling through the East Coast, I thought I'd review some of the very basics of DR.
1. Take backups (Fulls, Diffs, Logs) as often as your business requires. Ask your business areas bluntly: if a giant rock came crashing down on this server and destroyed it, how long could you go without data?
2. Make sure those backups make it somewhere off-site. Often this means to tape and an external off site backup store like Iron Mountain. If a disaster destroys your data center and you are forced to rebuild from scratch in a new location like Sunguard, you'd better have current off site backups.
3. Hardware failover is important (e.g. clustering) but also think about geographic failover/redundancy. Last week I discussed my love of Red Gate log shipping. Having a warm standby in a different geographic location is a very good hedge against local disruptions of the type many on the East Coast are fearing today.
Be safe out there everyone. This storm looks like it could be bad.
Chuck
