disaster-recovery-planner

RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) targets define how quickly you must recover and how much data loss is acceptable. Set tiered targets by business criticality—mission-critical systems need lower RTO/RPO than non-essential ones—then design backup frequency and failover speed to meet each tier's requirements.

Multi-region failover distributes your infrastructure across geographic regions so traffic automatically routes to a healthy region during outages. Use Route53 health checks and failover routing to detect failures and redirect users, then document runbooks for manual intervention and test failover quarterly.

Automated PostgreSQL PITR combines scheduled full backups with WAL (Write-Ahead Logging) archiving to restore your database to any moment in time. Configure backup retention policies, archive WAL files to durable storage, and test restore procedures regularly to ensure recovery works when needed.

A complete disaster recovery plan documents RTO/RPO targets by service tier, backup and restore procedures, multi-region failover topology, testing schedules, and runbooks for common failure scenarios. Include contact information, communication chains, and success criteria so teams can execute consistently during an incident.

Test disaster recovery procedures at least quarterly to validate that backups work, failover automation succeeds, and team members understand their roles. Run full end-to-end recovery drills annually and maintain a log of test results to identify gaps before a real outage occurs.

Disaster recovery planning scales to any deployment size. Even small applications benefit from defined RTO/RPO targets, automated backups, and tested failover procedures. Start with conservative targets and a single backup strategy, then expand to multi-region failover as your infrastructure grows.