How to Create a MySQL Disaster Recovery Plan

Disaster recovery involves the process, policies, and planning for the continuation of information integrity after a catastrophic event. The most important aspect is creating and maintaining a document that contains this information: a disaster recovery plan.

The following describes the steps in typical disaster recovery planning. These steps provide an overview; later sections offer a more in-depth look:

• Establish your disaster recovery team. Assuming your organization consists of more than a handful of employees, you should inform your manager now that you need to form a team to accomplish the goal of delivering a disaster recovery plan. Identify key roles you think will be needed to staff the team. Be sure to include personnel from all aspects of the organization and avoid the temptation to staff the group with only technology-savvy people. You need a complete perspective up and down the organization, and the only way to get that is to diversify.
  
  
• Develop a mission statement. Conduct a study of your current state of operations, identify the acceptable minimal level of operations for your organization, and state the goals of your disaster recovery process.
  
  
• Get management buy-in. Unless management initiated the task, it is your responsibility to persuade your management personnel that disaster recovery will require their support in order to succeed. It may be the only way you can get the needed resources (time, budget, personnel) to accomplish your goals.
  
  
• Plan for the worst. This is the part that many people find the most fun. You should start recording scenarios that describe the types of catastrophic events that could occur in your region. Include everything from theft, sabotage, weather events, and fire to disease and even worse. Be sure to start a file for these scenarios, as you will need them later when developing your recovery plans.
  
  
• Assess your inventory and organizational resources. Make a list of all of the information technology in your organization. Be sure to include everything needed for operational success, including employee workstations and network connectivity. You should list things that exist now, not what you deem the minimal set. Reducing the assets to the minimum acceptable set will come later. You should also record the current organizational chart and the chain of command, complete with primary and secondary decision makers. Remember to write all of this down and save it for later.
  
  
• Conduct risk assessment. Determine the effects that the loss of each of your resources could have on your organization. This will form your minimal level of operations. You should establish a priority for each resource and even establish more than one acceptable level of operations. Be sure to include a careful study of the applications and data needed. This will be used to help you decide which procedure to use when responding to events. You may be able to recover from partial losses, for instance, by redeploying your remaining systems instead of bringing up new systems, at a savings of critical time and money. It may be that you can operate for a short period of time with lower operational capability.
  
  
• Develop contingency plans. Now that you have the disaster scenarios, your assessment of your inventory, and your risk assessment, you can begin writing the first draft of your disaster recovery plan. These contingency plans can take any form you find useful, but most planners start making procedures using lists and narration. Use whatever format makes sense to your team.
  
  
• Create verification procedures. No plan is useful if it falls apart during execution. Now is the time to develop procedures to verify your disaster recovery plan. Start by having mock exercises in which you walk through your list of contingencies and make any adjustments needed. Go back to step 4 and cycle through the steps as you refine your disaster recovery plan.
  
  
• Practice makes perfect. After refining your disaster recovery plan, start real-life exercises to ensure the plan works. The ultimate goal is to demonstrate to management that you can achieve each acceptable level of operations. If you can’t, go back to step 6 and cycle through the remaining steps until you reach a complete and repeatable set of procedures.

Note: Your disaster recovery plan should have at least one full operational test yearly or whenever a major element in the organization or information technology changes.