Disaster Recovery Planning for Self-Hosted Infrastructure

When your server fails, how fast can you recover? A practical disaster recovery plan for businesses running their own infrastructure.", "content": "

Every server fails eventually. Hardware degrades, power supplies die, SSDs reach their write limit, and software updates introduce unexpected breakage. For businesses running self-hosted infrastructure, the question is not whether a disaster will happen, but how quickly you can recover when it does.

The 3-2-1 Backup Rule

The industry standard for data protection: three copies of your data, on two different media types, with at least one copy off-site. For a self-hosted setup this means:

• Primary: Your live server (one copy)
• Local backup: An external drive or NAS on the same network (second copy)
• Off-site backup: Encrypted backup to a cloud provider or second server (third copy)

Recovery Time Objective vs. Recovery Point Objective

Two numbers define your disaster recovery plan. RTO is how long you can afford to be without your systems. RPO is how much data you can afford to lose. A small business might target 4-hour RTO and 1-hour RPO. This means you accept losing up to one hour of data, and you need to be fully operational within four hours of a failure.

Backup Strategy

For Docker-based deployments, backup is straightforward: stop containers, dump databases, archive volumes, and encrypt everything before transferring off-site. Database dumps should happen at least hourly for production systems. Full server backups can run nightly during low-traffic periods.

Testing Your Backup

The most common disaster recovery failure is discovering that backups are corrupt when you need them most. Test your restore process quarterly. Spin up a temporary server, restore your backup, and verify that every application starts and functions correctly. Document every step so you can execute it under pressure.

VPS1 includes automated encrypted backups with quarterly restore testing for all managed clients.