Disaster Recovery Field Notes

Cross-region failover is not proven by a standby environment existing. It is proven by the standby environment accepting traffic with the expected identity, data, capacity, and observability. The hard part is not usually creating the second region. The hard part is proving it can become primary without discovering missing assumptions during the incident. Readiness Domains Review failover readiness by domain: routing and ingress. DNS ownership and TTL behavior. certificates and trust chains. identity provider reachability. secrets availability and rotation path. data replication freshness. compute and storage capacity. observability and alert routing. operator access to the recovery region. return-to-primary decision path. Each domain needs a current check, not only a design note. ...

Disaster recovery work produces decisions as much as commands. Keep both. During a real recovery, operators need to know what was restored, from which point, why that point was accepted, who authorized failover, and what proved service recovery. A terminal transcript alone cannot answer those questions. Keep The Bundle Shape Predictable Use a boring bundle structure: dr-<event>-<date>/ 00-decision-record.md 01-initial-state.txt 02-backup-freshness.txt 03-restore-actions.log 04-validation-output.txt 05-open-risks.md 06-communications.md The exact names are less important than the phase order. A future reviewer should be able to reconstruct the event without reading Slack history. ...

A full-site disaster recovery plan is not a backup inventory. It is a decision model for operating when the normal platform boundary is gone. Backups answer whether data exists somewhere else. DR answers whether the organization can restore service in the right order, with the right authority, inside an agreed failure window. Start With Service Tiers Do not plan every system as if it has the same recovery objective. Define tiers first: ...