Many pieces of equipment are absolutely critical to your organization -- some more than others. The purpose of disaster recovery planning is to ensure your organization (and, for that matter, Escape) is prepared to act immediately when something dies, as well as establish exactly what kind of tolerance to down time and data loss you have.

What kinds of data needs to be restored first? Second? Third? How soon must these stages of recovery be accomplished? How long will a complete restore of your lost data actually take? If your server dies, is there a computer that can be immediately pressed into service as a temporary file server? If all that's failed is a hard drive, where can a replacement be obtained? How quickly must that happen? If a RAID fails, what steps will be taken to restore the lost data to the remaining available storage? If a tape backup fails, how will your organization back up its most critical data until it is repaired?

These are all questions that Escape asks during preparation of one of our most popular products, the Disaster Recovery Plan. Don't get caught in a bind without one -- knowing what to do ahead of time without further argument or discussion makes prompt recovery much easier and gives us an unquestioned game plan the instant disaster strikes.