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Lets go back a step - what are the risks we are trying to manage with a data backup plan? * Failure of a single machine - hard drive failure, motherboard failure * Damage or destruction to office by water, fire etc * Failure of existing backup Multiple backups are often required - an onsite backup will be faster to recover from, but an offsite backup
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1. Hold a tabletop exercise of as many people as practical to discuss a credible (not worst case) scenario and how your organisation would respond to it. Capture the learnings and use them to kick off the planning. The exercise should only take 2-4 hours. This will focus in detail on the impacts of a credible event or two, and the considerations that
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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'
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Preparedness - most importantly this also includes training. If your personnel haven't been trained in the organisations response and recovery arrangements - the overall performance of the organisation during and following a crisis will be less effective. One note on 'Worst Case' scenario planning - many organisations (certainly here in
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I agree with Don. In some regards, it is about managing personnel risk - and hence comes back to an understanding of the role people have in the organisation, and how easy it would be to replace them. Not to mention the information and undocumented processes that they manage - this doesn't just have to happen in IT. To use Don's accounting example
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Hi Kevin, NFPA1600 is probably the best current standard to give some idea as to disaster management requirements. http://www.nfpa.org/assets/files/pdf/nfpa1600.pdf The biggest problem with a number of separate plans as listed in the NIST document above, is actually making sure that you have a consistent framework to tie them all together. Not only
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I am currently going about the process of using EMC Retrospect and external hard drives to backup the content of a PC (or Mac or Linux) box. If the machine doesn't have a complex range of software packages, I'd be inclined to reinstall the OS and key applications and then restore the data. Otherwise I'd try the backup for recovering the