DISASTER PLANNING: IT disaster plans available for download?

Will any plans submitted be available for download? I am especially interested in IT Disaster Plans. Any ideas for templates? Thanks for the forum!

Hi,

Disaster planning is very much a case-specific exercise - your plans would be quite different to mine because of different risks, different skills and assets, different environment, legislation and culture.

Templates probably provide a more useful tool because they are generic in nature and offer a good platform on which to build. I can recommend the British Library Disaster Emergency Planning Template as a good starting point for NPO's and Libraries seeking to establish a disaster planning process.

Don

Disasater Planning Template - free

The Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York has "Disaster Planning/Emergency Preparedness Checklist" a guideline that offers the points an organization needs to think about in order to prepare its own disaster recovery plan so that, should an interruption occur, it is able to resume operations.

It's a MS Word document that you can cut and paste and do with as you see fit.

It's available for free at http://www.npccny.org/info/disaster_plan.htm

An excellent guide - thanks for the pointer! (people following the link above will need to remove the full stop from the URL)

Another v-good guide for developing Disaster Plans is available here (designed for libraries but with concepts common to NPO's)

These guides are very useful if you want to start your planning process 'from scratch', rather than using a template. Personally I prefer this approach because it assists understanding and helps to educate us in the concepts of disaster planning,

Dmyers have you used the NYC guide to develop a disaster plan? – If you have, would you share it here?

Don

Since there seem to be suggestions for general disaster plans being posted, the California Preservation Program has a downloadable Word template for libraries and archives that can be edited to accommodate their size and collection needs. See:

Library disaster plan

See other disaster planning information on this website -- calpreservation.org

I'd support Don in saying that it is more important to go through the planning process, than to produce a plan from a generic template. Plans often need customising to suit the organisations needs, operating environment, and indeed culture that they are designed to operate in.

You may sell yourself short if you just 'fill in the blanks'.

Cheers Gavin

These are all excellent suggestions and resources. I'm not against perusing others' plans, because they WILL get you thinking about things that you won't come up with on your own if you start planning from an empty mind on your own. If you don't have a plan, you can't come up with one, and in this case, you're not re-inventing the wheel, you're just seeing all the considerations in having and using a wheel. (sorry for the analogy).

In looking at donc's "other" resources for libraries, I followed a link there to

http://www.m25lib.ac.uk/m25dcp/refer.html#links

which lists several other "web-mounted" [interesting use of the word] resources or links.

I suggest looking at many others in formulating your own. As I said, you'll see considerations that you may not come up with on your own or by copying one other organization's plan.

As with data backups, disaster plans are not to be considered good unless they are TESTED, TESTED, TESTED. Get an empty computer and try to restore your tape or other data to test it. Likewise, have a day when you are not allowed to use your usual resources and see how you'll get along.

A friend of mine worked for Chase Bank in their I.T. Dept. and once a quarter, they do a disaster recovery test. They'd 'unplug' the server and try to restore data and operations just to see if they could. This is the best training scenario because you haven't actually lost any data.

If anyone is interested, I wrote a short paper about a specific recovery scenario and a server (based on a real experience) that could be of some help.

I appreciate everyone's contributions to this topic and thank you all for participating.

Another source for templates and checklists is TechRepublic. Most are available for free, you have to register.

For example:
Practical Disaster Recovery Planning: A Step-by-Step Guide

> If anyone is interested, I wrote a short paper about a specific recovery scenario and a server (based on a real experience) that could be of some help.

Hi, and thank you for the offer - yes please! (is it downloadable?)

Don

I'll email it to you.