The difference between backup and disaster recovery is who gets you back online

Backup and disaster recovery get used as if they mean the same thing. They don’t, and the difference becomes obvious at the worst possible moment, when a server is down and someone asks how long until it’s back on.

Backup keeps your data from disappearing. Disaster recovery is what gets the business back on its feet. Most teams staff the first job and assume they’ve covered the second.

The promise each makes

Backup means your data still exists somewhere after something goes wrong. That’s the whole promise. It says nothing about how fast you get it back, what shape it’s in, or whether your application even runs once it’s restored.

Disaster recovery (DR) means the thing your customers depend on comes back within a timeframe you can put a number on. The data surviving is assumed. What DR adds is the part where someone gets you operating again, on a clock. A backup with no recovery-time target is an insurance policy you can’t cash in on any particular schedule.

The gap

Having a copy of your data says nothing about how long it takes to turn it back into a running business. Restoring 500GB and rebuilding a working environment around it are different amounts of work, and only one of them is what having backups covers.

It helps to picture what recovery asks of you. You’ve got the data, but now the operating system needs rebuilding, the application reconfiguring, the database reattaching, the DNS and certificates sorting out, and every one of those steps is time the business is still down. A backup hands you the raw material. Rebuilding a working system out of it is slow, and it’s a lot more work than having backups makes it sound.

Ransomware makes it sharper. An attack encrypts what it reaches, and getting a clean copy back isn’t the hard part. Standing the environment back up fast, without dragging the infection back in is, and that’s recovery, not backup.

Then there’s the human problem. A backup sitting in storage doesn’t restore itself. If getting back online depends on someone noticing, deciding, and running the restore by hand, the speed of your recovery is really the speed of whoever’s on call that night.

Closing the gap

Have someone own the recovery, not just the copy. That’s the whole idea behind managed backup. Your data sits off-site, the restores get tested so they work when you need them, and a team runs the restore instead of leaving it to whoever happens to be awake. When disaster strikes, software doesn’t answer the phone, Nexcess does.

For most businesses, a managed backup strategy, with a dedicated team that runs the restoration, is the right level of protection, and it’s what we do. For the workloads that can’t take any downtime at all, the ones that need automated failover and a committed recovery-time number, that’s full disaster recovery, a bigger decision we’ll walk you through. Either way, start on our backup and storage page and we’ll help you size the right level of protection.

How to tell which one you have

Ask your provider how long your system takes to come back, and who’s going to run that restore. If the honest answer is that nobody’s sure, you have a backup strategy, not a recovery strategy, and it’s better to find that out now than during an outage.