With hurricane season coming up, and the ever-present threat of tsunamis and earthquakes around the Pacific Rim, folks are always concerned about their information systems. Businesses and government agencies, large and small, need to be prepared for such disasters.

Of course, like everything else, budgetary constraints govern the complexity of a disaster recovery solution. The upshot is that an appropriate solution for your organization should be relatively affordable. For example, if you are supporting hundreds or even thousands of users, or 90 percent-plus of your revenue comes from your computing environment, then the solution cost should be but a small fraction of the price to be paid if all of your systems went down.

Three strategies form the basis of most, if not all, disaster-recovery solutions. First, if your most important data is made of word-processing documents, spreadsheets and other office productivity-based files, a simple copy is probably the most appropriate solution. Your files can be backed up to the cloud using one of several low-cost options, such as Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft’s OneDrive. You can get fancy with these and use scripts or other tools to keep multiple file versions backed up. For most individuals and small businesses, this will be the most appropriate solution.

For larger organizations, something more robust is usually needed. This is especially the case when large databases are involved. A popular solution for such environments is referred to as storage-based backup. Basically, all of your data is backed up to a remote site, but the systems and applications associated with this data are not backed up.

In the past, this type of backup gave information technology folks fits because it basically requires an identical computer with which to use the data. If your system was even the slightest bit different, such as a different version of the operating system, different disk controller or even a network card, it would be difficult to become operational. Nowadays, however, with the advent of virtualization, it is much easier to make your hardware appear identical.

System-based backup is really the most reliable form of backup and is decidedly old-school. Not only is your data backed up, but your entire system, including operating system and application sets, is also backed up. System-based backups are much easier to turn operational when compared with storage-based backups. Such backups, however, typically require more care and feeding to ensure operability.

John Agsalud is an IT expert with more than 25 years of information technology experience. Reach him at johnagsalud@yahoo.com.