About disaster recovery
This topic provides information about recovering data by using NetBackup and Vault, when you have to recall your media from your off-site storage location. It also provides general information about preparing for a disaster recovery situation.
See the "Disaster Recovery" section in the NetBackup Troubleshooting Guide.
Data backup is essential to any data protection strategy, especially a strategy that is expected to assist in disaster recovery. Regularly backing up data and then being able to restore that data within a specified time frame are important components of recovery. Regardless of any other recovery provisions, backup protects against data loss from complete system failure. And off-site storage of backup images protects against damage to your on-site media or against a disaster that damages or destroys your facility or site.
To perform recovery successfully, the data must be tracked to know at what point in time it was backed up. Knowing the time allows your organization to assess the information that cannot be recovered. Configure your data backup schedules to allow your organization to achieve its recovery point objective (RPO), which is the point in time before which you cannot accept lost data. If your organization can accept one day's data loss, your backup schedule should be at least daily so you can achieve an RPO of one day before any disaster.
Your organization also may have a recovery time objective (RTO), which is the expected recovery time or how long it takes to recover. Recovery time is a function of the type of disaster and of the methods that are used for recovery. You may have multiple RTOs, depending on which services your organization must recover and when.
High availability technologies can make the recovery point very close or even identical to the point of failure or disaster, and they also can provide very short recovery times. However, the closer to the failure that you place your RTO and RPO, the more expensive it is to build and maintain the systems that are required to achieve recovery. Your analysis of the costs and benefits of various recovery strategies should be part of your organization's recovery planning. Understanding disaster recovery planning lets you place Vault and tape-based backups that are stored off-site in the proper context within your disaster recovery objectives.