What are the categories of disaster recovery?

Disaster recovery (DR) can be categorized into several types based on recovery objectives and strategies. The main categories include:

1. Data Center Disaster Recovery: Focuses on restoring IT infrastructure and data at the data center level. This includes hardware, software, and network recovery.

   • Example: A company uses redundant servers and storage systems in a secondary data center to ensure business continuity after a primary data center failure.

2. Cloud Disaster Recovery: Leverages cloud services to back up and restore data and applications. It offers scalability, cost-efficiency, and rapid recovery.

   • Example: A business uses Tencent Cloud's cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions to replicate data to the cloud, enabling quick restoration in case of on-premises failures.

3. Virtualized Disaster Recovery: Involves replicating virtual machines (VMs) to a secondary site or cloud, allowing faster recovery compared to traditional physical server recovery.

   • Example: A company uses VMware vSphere Replication with Tencent Cloud's cloud platform to replicate VMs and ensure minimal downtime during outages.

4. Application-Level Disaster Recovery: Ensures critical applications are recovered with minimal data loss and downtime, often involving application-specific backups and failover mechanisms.

   • Example: An e-commerce platform uses Tencent Cloud's database replication and load balancing to ensure its online store remains operational during server failures.

5. Warm Standby Disaster Recovery: Maintains a partially active secondary site with reduced capacity, allowing faster recovery than cold standby but at a higher cost than hot standby.

   • Example: A financial institution keeps a secondary site with essential systems running at low capacity to quickly scale up during an outage.

6. Hot Standby Disaster Recovery: Keeps a fully operational secondary site ready to take over immediately, ensuring near-zero downtime.

   • Example: A global enterprise uses Tencent Cloud's multi-region deployment to maintain a live backup site that can instantly assume operations if the primary site fails.

7. Cold Standby Disaster Recovery: Involves a secondary site with minimal or no active systems, requiring significant time and effort to restore operations.

   • Example: A small business stores backups on tapes or external drives in an offsite location, which must be transported and restored manually after a disaster.

For cloud-based disaster recovery, Tencent Cloud offers services like Cloud Backup, Cloud Disaster Recovery (CVM Replication), and Multi-Region Deployment to ensure high availability and quick recovery.