Disaster recovery plans and recovery testing
You write a service's technical recovery plan, carry out restore, failover and failback on target systems and prove RTO and RPO by measuring them.
Level 401 · 15 lessons · 12 practice labs
Lessons
The plan
- The structure of a DR plan
- Service tiers and recovery order
- Recovery runbooks
- Quick task: a recovery runbook for one service
Technical recovery
- Restoring a database to a point in time
- Rebuilding an application: configuration and secrets
- Failing over to the standby site and DNS
- Failing back to the primary site
- Quick task: measure the real RTO and RPO
Testing programme
- Test types: tabletop, partial, full failover
- Clean-room recovery after ransomware
- Test evidence and the results report
- Quick task: rebuild an encrypted server from a clean backup
Finish
- Governing the recovery testing programme
- Capstone: a full failover exercise and report
Practice labs
- Find the missing sections of the plan: Check a DR plan for activation criteria, roles, communication, recovery order and failback sections.
- Set service tiers and recovery order: Sort fifteen services into tiers by dependencies and recovery objectives and write the recovery order.
- A recovery runbook for one service: Write a runbook with prerequisites, steps, verification and rollback for the lab web service and run it once.
- Restore a database from backup: Restore the lab database from the last full backup and verify the row counts.
- Restore to a point in time: Restore the lab database to just before a mistaken delete and verify the lost records are back.
- Rebuild the application: Rebuild the application server from the configuration repository and the secrets store and pass the health check.
- Verify the failover: After a prepared failover, verify that the name resolves to the standby site and the service answers.
- Measure the real RTO and RPO: Start an outage in the lab, measure time to restore service and the window of lost data and compare with the objectives.
- Fail back to the primary site: Synchronise the data built up on the standby back to the primary, return the traffic and prove data consistency.
- Choose the test type: Choose tabletop, partial or full failover testing for six objectives.
- Rebuild a server from a clean backup: In the lab, rebuild a prepared server whose files are encrypted from a clean backup on an isolated network and verify its integrity.
- The test results report and programme governance: From the records of a failover exercise, write a report with measured times, problems, actions and next year's test calendar.
About this course
You write a service's technical recovery plan, carry out restore, failover and failback on target systems and prove RTO and RPO by measuring them.
What you will learn
- The plan
- Technical recovery
- Testing programme
- Finish
Prerequisites
You should have practised the topics of the same path up to level 301.
Lab environment
Lessons run in your own Kali Linux terminal in the browser, connected to a private lab network. Nothing to install.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this course right for my level?
- The course is at level 401; it assumes you know the topics of the lower-level courses.
- Is there anything to install?
- No. Every lesson runs in your own lab environment that opens in the browser.
- How do lessons work?
- Each lesson has 8 to 10 steps and a short quiz. Early steps show the command to type, later steps give less help; if two attempts fail, the solution opens.
- Can I try it for free?
- Yes. The first three lessons of every course are free.