Disaster recovery on AWS: pick a strategy you will actually test

DR plans fail when they’re too ambitious to rehearse.

A better approach: choose a DR pattern aligned to your RTO/RPO, then test it routinely.

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Common DR patterns

- **Backup & restore**: lowest cost, slowest recovery - **Pilot light**: minimal core services running - **Warm standby**: scaled-down copy always on - **Active/active**: highest cost, fastest recovery (and hardest to operate)

The missing piece: rehearsals

Whatever you choose, schedule:

- quarterly restore tests - failover drills - permissions checks (who can do what during an incident)

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How PG Technologies helps

We help teams turn DR into muscle memory:

- RTO/RPO definition workshops - architecture and runbooks - automation for backups and restores - incident drills

Sources

- AWS Well‑Architected Reliability Pillar: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/reliability-pillar/welcome.html