Disaster Planning

Posted by foreverlight on March 9, 2011 | 0 notes

In recent months, there were natural disasters in major cities. Floods in Brisbane, earthquake in Christchurch. Without some form of Disaster Planning, recovery will be difficult. Personal and corporate data will be hard to recover.

Natural disaster usually means catastrophic power failure, and all Data centers will lose power. UPS power backup is only available for a few hours at most, and power generators will stop after they run out of fuel. Fuel resupply will not be possible with flooded roads or badly damaged roads. Web services and websites will no longer be available. Emergency services broadcasting through web servers or websites will no longer function.

What’s the point of “emergency” broadcast websites if they will only work in normal everyday situations?.

There are several Cloud based backup methods available today. Cloud storage services will store a copy of your key files, or your website backup in remote locations. This will ensure that your important files are safe even if your own local hard drive is lost, stolen, or destroyed. You will be able to restore your website even if your web server or Data center is no longer functioning.

A high end system such as Amazon S3 Storage is designed to:
# provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year.
# sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities.

Jungledisk.com and Box.net provide good Cloud storage services for a few dollars a month. Box.net has a free plan for 5 Gb of cloud storage.

Disaster Planning for Websites:
Web Server – will host your current website, and should be available online 24/7.
Webmaster – will usually have a copy of your website.
Website Owner – you should keep a copy of your website.

In a crisis:
Web Server – hardware failure or power failure – website will be offline.
Webmaster, or Website owner, should be able to restore the website from an existing backup.

If no backup exists -<>– all is lost.
If the backup is stored in a Cloud service, we can recover !!!.

Article posted by Joel Wong on 9 March 2011.