Professional Team Foundation Server

5.1. Disaster Recovery Overview

Disasters come in all shapes and sizes. From natural disasters, such as tornadoes and floods, to hardware failure to accidentally dropping a table from a database. A disaster can strike at any time and how prepared you are can make all the difference. Given that, here are some things to ponder when thinking about disaster recovery.

To fully be prepared, you need to have a disaster recovery plan. This written checklist of everything that needs to happen in the event of an emergency will be a key to getting your organization up and running as quickly and efficiently as possible. Once something bad happens, people shouldn't have to think, they should be able follow a plan that has proven results.

Proven results means the plan has been thoroughly tested. You need to constantly test your disaster recovery plan. This provides several benefits. You have confidence in knowing your plan works. You are able to find any deficiencies in your plan, such as out-of-date material, and make the appropriate corrections. Finally, you gain experience in putting your plan into action, which, in the event of a real emergency, allows you to know what to expect.

When planning for an emergency, you should also see how much of the plan can be automated. As you learn later in this chapter, a good bit of SQL Server's backup and recovery can be automated using maintenance plans. Automation can save you time and prevent errors that occur from having to do something manually. ...