Disaster Recovery

Purpose

Provide comprehensive guidance for designing disaster recovery (DR) strategies, implementing backup systems, and validating recovery procedures across databases, Kubernetes clusters, and cloud infrastructure. Enable teams to define RTO/RPO objectives, select appropriate backup tools, configure automated failover, and test DR capabilities through chaos engineering.

When to Use This Skill

Invoke this skill when:

• Defining recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO)
• Implementing database backups with point-in-time recovery (PITR)
• Setting up Kubernetes cluster backup and restore workflows
• Configuring cross-region replication for high availability
• Testing disaster recovery procedures through chaos experiments
• Meeting compliance requirements (GDPR, SOC 2, HIPAA)
• Automating backup monitoring and alerting
• Designing multi-cloud disaster recovery architectures

Core Concepts

RTO and RPO Fundamentals

Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Maximum acceptable downtime after a disaster before business impact becomes unacceptable.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO): Maximum acceptable data loss measured in time. Defines how far back in time recovery must reach.

Criticality Tiers:

• Tier 0 (Mission-Critical): RTO < 1 hour, RPO < 5 minutes
• Tier 1 (Production): RTO 1-4 hours, RPO 15-60 minutes
• Tier 2 (Important): RTO 4-24 hours, RPO 1-6 hours
• Tier 3 (Standard): RTO > 24 hours, RPO > 6 hours

3-2-1 Backup Rule

Maintain 3 copies of data on 2 different media types with 1 copy offsite.

Example implementation:

• Primary: Production database
• Secondary: Local backup storage
• Tertiary: Cloud backup (S3/GCS/Azure)

Backup Types

Full Backup: Complete copy of all data. Slowest to create, fastest to restore.

Incremental Backup: Only changes since last backup. Fastest to create, requires full + all incrementals to restore.