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Disaster Recovery Objectives and Methods Questions

Covers the core goals and recovery approaches for recovering systems after a failure. Candidates should understand Recovery Time Objective which defines how quickly systems must be restored, and Recovery Point Objective which bounds acceptable data loss. Describe and compare recovery methods such as cold standby, warm standby, and hot standby including their cost, complexity, and expected recovery times. Discuss how to choose an approach based on business impact analysis, critical path dependencies, and cost versus risk trade offs. Explain runbooks and failover orchestration, automation of recovery procedures, validation and regular testing of recovery plans, metrics and monitoring for recovery readiness, and operational considerations for maintaining standby systems and exercising failover in production-like tests.

EasyTechnical
38 practiced
Describe a maintenance plan for standby infrastructure (warm or hot) that balances cost and recovery readiness. Include routines for patching, data validation, capacity testing, and periodic failover drills. Explain how to track and demonstrate readiness to stakeholders.
HardTechnical
32 practiced
You must take a consistent snapshot across polyglot data stores including a SQL DB, a NoSQL store, and a message queue so that the system can be restored to a single logical point in time with no partial transactions. Propose an approach to coordinate snapshots across these systems and discuss tradeoffs in complexity and RPO.
EasyTechnical
37 practiced
Explain why regular DR testing is important beyond proving runbooks. Describe three different types of DR tests (tabletop, partial failover, full failover) and what each one validates. Indicate typical frequency and success criteria for each test type in an enterprise context.
MediumTechnical
38 practiced
Given sample backup log lines in CSV format like 'db_name,timestamp,status,size_mb' write a Python script to compute last successful backup per database and flag any database whose last successful backup exceeds a configured RPO threshold. Describe input assumptions and error handling strategies.
EasyTechnical
32 practiced
Compare cold standby, warm standby, and hot standby strategies for disaster recovery. For each method describe expected recovery time ranges, cost and complexity, example use cases, and primary operational risks. Use the lens of an SRE deciding which approach fits a mid-size enterprise revenue-generating service.

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