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A disaster recovery strategy with no down time

Most experienced backup and disaster planning experts would agree that remote backup would have been the best disaster recovery strategy but for the inevitable down time that comes with it. Remote backup gives you all your critical data in perfect shape but that would still leave you with the big headache of setting up a new network before you can resume your production activities/transactions. This in simpler terms translates to a pretty long duration of interrupted business activity.

In business terms, this downtime, which may span anywhere between a few hours to several days, depending on the number of systems on the desired network and the complexity of data population, could well mean revenue losses to the tune of millions of dollars. This is not an exaggeration as popular online entities do transactions worth over millions of dollars during their peak business hours. A perfect disaster recovery not only means having all the critical data but a non-interruption of the business activity, be it online transactions of banking operations.

This means a recovery with zero down time, or in other terms, going ahead with the transactions as if nothing happened!

So how do you perfect remote backup to make a better disaster recovery plan

The first step would be to graduate the process from a mere backup of critical files at another location to copying all files to the backup location. This process is called file mirroring.

Further, file mirroring should be done on to storage media at a backup site that has the same number of systems as the original location. In other terms, you should have an exact replica of the actual network at the backup site and should populate the network in real time with all the data that comes in to the primary business location. This would mean having a backup location that exactly resembles the primary business location in terms of data architecture and functionality.

Hence, if disaster strikes one location, the business can go on unaffected from the second location, as if nothing happened! That is exactly what we wanted, right? A perfect recovery with all the data intact in the second safe location.

Is remote file mirroring, a viable disaster recovery option for everybody?

The funny thing is, remote file mirroring as a disaster recovery strategy is viable only for either individuals/single system business entities or very large corporate houses as the cost can prove to be prohibitive for companies having a comparatively small budget, especially if they have a decent sized network to duplicate.

As a disaster recovery plan, individuals can opt for something called an online file mirror via the Internet and have an exact replica of their hard disks with all the configurations on a remote file server. In the event of their hard disks having a crash, the data can be retrieved and populated on a new disk, thus achieving disaster recovery in least time. Thus, mission accomplished!

Lison Joseph is a contributor at Free-backup.info -- the home of the popular Amazon S3 based online backup service -- Back2zip. This article available at http://free-backup.info/bid-goodbye-disaster-recovery-real-time-remote-file-mirror.html