A disaster recovery plan is the act of deciding in advance how much data you can lose and how quickly you must be back. Those two numbers — RPO and RTO — come directly from your backup design. Below is how to set them and where backup sits in the plan.
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Without these two numbers you cannot choose a backup frequency sensibly.
"At most how many hours of data can I lose?" This sets your backup frequency directly. Hourly backups mean a one-hour RPO.
"How quickly must the system be back?" This drives your restore speed and readiness.
How far back must you be able to go? How late you might notice a problem decides this.
How often is the plan rehearsed? An untested plan is a wish, not a plan.
This mapping is a practical starting point for most businesses.
Content rarely changes; weekly or daily is enough and RPO can be a few days.
Daily is reasonable — you lose at most one day of content.
Daily gets expensive fast. Hourly brings RPO down to one hour.
More frequent than hourly may be warranted, driven by order volume.
Files change rarely, databases constantly. Separate frequencies protect more and cost less.
In a crisis you need a document to read, not a memory to recall.
Which systems come back first? Is the order written down?
Is an acceptable loss and recovery time defined per system?
Where are the backups? Who can access them? Where is the encryption key?
Are the steps documented, or in one person's head?
Who tells whom, and when? Who owns client notification?
When was the plan last rehearsed? Were the results recorded?
Recovery is impossible without a backup, yet having one is not sufficient on its own. Most of the time lost in a crisis goes not to "was there a backup?" but to "who restores it, from where, and how?"
So prepare three things alongside your backups: written restore steps, pre-defined authorised people, and your encryption key stored independently of the server. If the key existed only on the server you lost, your encrypted backup is lost with it.
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