IS3110 Week5 Lab

Week 5 Laboratory

Disaster Recovery Back-up Procedures and Recovery Instructions

Learning Objectives and Outcomes
Upon completing this lab, students will be able to:
Relate how to lower RTO with properly documented back-up and recovery steps
Understand the inversely proportional relationship between RTO and redundancy.
Understand the process of defining IT system and application recovery procedures
Understand the risks of using external e-mail as a backup and storage solution for production data.

Week 5 Lab Worksheet

Develop Disaster Recovery Back-up Procedures and Recovery Instructions

Lab Assessment Questions

1 How do documented back-up and recovery procedures help achieve RTO? By recording and applying backup and recovery procedures that are listed, the recovery process is a lot smoother of a process, helping with the time portion of RTO. By having effective backup and recovery procedures you should have the necessary resources to restore systems from backups and a repeatable process that is known to succeed in achieving RTO.

2 True or False. To achieve an RTO of 0, you need 100% redundancy in your IT system, application, and data. TRUE

3 Review the “Restore Horror Stories” scenario on page 371 of the text. What is most important when considering data back-up? Whats most important when considering a data-backup up is to test the backups to make sure they are going to work when the system needs to be restored. There is no use in backing up a system and never look to see if they are being done properly. If you backup corrupt files, you are then going to restore those corrupt files back into the system. Also having a good backup plan in place would avoid such errors such as the reading states.

4 Review the “Restore Horror Stories” scenario on page 371 of the text. What is most important when considering data recovery? Again, testing the restore process and making sure that the data on the tapes is backed up properly. A plan on how the backup is going to be recovered is ideal and a policy needs to be in place for checking the backups as they are done. Another paln would be to not go in blind when recovering hoping that the backups are going to work when they are needed and “crossing your fingers” that the process will go as planned. Monitoring the system is important so that there is knowledge that files are not being backed up. Testing the most recent backup is important.

5 What are the risks of using your external e-mail box as a back-up and data storage solution? The risks using email would be that they are constantly corrupt. Emails are not taken care of by people and known to carry corrupt files and links that should not be on a system. Important emails can be saved in a different location where the initial backup will restore those files if needed. The risk would be restoring corrupt data into the system if they are not deleted prior.