Disaster Recovery Planning for Laravel Applications

Hope Is Not a Strategy

Disasters happen: hardware fails, data centers flood, humans make mistakes. The question isn't if something will go wrong, but how quickly you can recover when it does.

Recovery Objectives

• RPO (Recovery Point Objective): How much data loss is acceptable?
• RTO (Recovery Time Objective): How quickly must you recover?

Backup Strategy

# Database backups
- Hourly: Keep 24 hours
- Daily: Keep 7 days
- Weekly: Keep 4 weeks
- Monthly: Keep 12 months

# Application backups
- Code: Git repository
- Uploads: S3 with versioning
- Configuration: Version controlled

Testing Restores

# Monthly restore drill
1. Spin up fresh server
2. Restore database from backup
3. Deploy code from repository
4. Restore uploads from S3
5. Verify application functionality
6. Document any issues

Runbook

Document step-by-step recovery procedures:

## Database Recovery

1. Identify latest clean backup
2. Create new RDS instance from snapshot
3. Update application .env with new credentials
4. Test connectivity
5. Update DNS if needed

## Complete Environment Recovery

1. Launch new EC2 instances from AMI
2. Restore database
3. Deploy application code
4. Configure load balancer
5. Update DNS records
6. Verify functionality
7. Notify stakeholders

Multi-Region Considerations

• Database replicas in secondary region
• S3 cross-region replication
• AMI copies in secondary region
• DNS failover configuration

Conclusion

Disaster recovery requires planning, documentation, and regular testing. Know your recovery objectives, document procedures, and practice before you need them.