What is Disaster Recovery?
Turkish: Felaket Kurtarma
Disaster recovery restores systems after outages or data loss within target RTO and RPO limits through tested plans.
What is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery is the plan for restoring critical systems after a major outage, data loss, accidental deletion, cyberattack, regional cloud issue, or hardware failure. It is not just taking backups; teams must know how quickly systems can return and how much data loss is acceptable.
For example, if an e-commerce database is corrupted and the last clean backup is 24 hours old, orders may be lost. The business needs to define acceptable data loss and downtime before the incident happens.
RTO and RPO
Disaster recovery has two central metrics. RTO (Recovery Time Objective) defines how quickly the system must be restored. RPO (Recovery Point Objective) defines the maximum acceptable amount of data loss.
A plan usually covers:
- Backup frequency and retention period
- Database and file replication
- Alternative region or provider strategy
- DNS, CDN, and traffic routing steps
- Recovery owners and communication plan
- Regular restore testing
Risk and Business Continuity
Disaster recovery is only real if backups can actually be restored. An untested backup is an assumption during a crisis.
Replication matters for low RPO targets, but if bad data is deleted or corrupted, the mistake may also replicate. Uptime targets should be evaluated against cost and business risk. Not every system needs active-active architecture, but every critical system needs a written and tested recovery plan.
Related Terms
A backup strategy defines how often, where, and how data is copied so teams can recover from outages, mistakes, or attacks.
Chaos EngineeringChaos engineering tests resilience by injecting controlled failures and observing whether systems keep working under real-world stress.
Multi-Region DeploymentMulti-region architecture runs applications and data across multiple geographic regions to reduce latency, outage impact, and disaster risk.
RansomwareRansomware is malware that encrypts systems or files, blocks access, and demands payment from the victim organization.
Database ReplicationDatabase replication copies data across multiple servers to improve availability, redundancy, and read capacity without moving the primary workload.
UptimeUptime expresses how long a system remains accessible outside planned or unplanned outages, usually as a percentage or time window.