Disaster Recovery Overview
Disaster recovery (DR) is how you plan for and respond to major outages—a region down, a data center lost, or a destructive event that takes out primary systems.
It’s not about fixing a bug or rolling back a deploy; it’s about having a clear path to restore service when the usual infrastructure is unavailable.
DR planning starts with two numbers:
RTO (recovery time objective—how long you can afford to be down) and RPO (recovery point objective—how much data loss is acceptable).
Those drive your choices for backup, replication, and failover.
You also need runbooks for when to declare a disaster, how to fail over, and how to fail back—and you need to test them regularly so they work when you need them.
This section is about the practices that make DR concrete: defining RTO and RPO, designing backup and restore, executing failover and failback, and building a testing cadence that keeps your DR capability real.
DR is part of incident response—when a major outage occurs, you follow the Incident lifecycle while executing your DR runbooks.
For how to design infrastructure for redundancy and failover, see the Infrastructure / redundancy example.
- RTO and RPO — What they mean, how they drive decisions, and how they relate to availability SLOs.
- Backup and Restore — Backup strategy, types, restore testing, and point-in-time recovery.
- Failover and Failback — Site/region failover execution, runbook structure, and returning to primary.
- DR Planning and Testing — DR strategy, runbooks, testing cadence, and game-days.