Published May 25, 2026
Part 1 explained how backups, recovery targets, and runbooks fit together. This part starts from a different place: the failure itself. A plan written for "a disaster" tends to be too vague to use. A plan written for specific failures usually is not.
Good cloud disaster recovery begins with the question of what, exactly, you are recovering from. The answer changes the response.
In practice, it means having a prepared answer for each realistic way your systems can fail. Four scenarios cover most of what cloud teams face.
Accidental deletion. Someone removes a server, a volume, or a database. The data is gone from the live system, but the rest of the environment is fine. Recovery means restoring from a backup.
Bad change or corruption. A deployment or script damages data, and the damage may go unnoticed for hours or days. Here, the newest backup may already contain the corruption, so how far back your copies go matters as much as how recent they are.
Failure of a single resource. A disk fails or an instance becomes unreachable. Recovery may be a restore or a replacement, depending on how the system is built.
Loss of a wider area. A region or a provider has a serious outage. This is rarer, and it is the scenario where backups kept in one place offer the least protection.
Each scenario has different needs, which is why one generic plan rarely fits all of them.
Teams often plan for the dramatic case and neglect the common one. Region-wide outages get the conference talks, yet accidental deletion and bad changes cause far more everyday trouble. A plan built around a rare failure can leave the likely ones unprepared.
The same thinking leads to over-engineering. A second copy of the whole environment running elsewhere is one way to recover, but it costs money and adds complexity. For many systems, restoring from a recent backup within an acceptable time is a sound answer, and spending on more than that is not automatically better.
Another misunderstanding is that backups protect against everything. A backup made after corruption begins preserves the corruption. Retention is the safeguard here, because older copies give you somewhere to go back to.
Finally, people assume the hard part is the restore. Often it is the order of operations. Systems depend on each other, and restoring an application before its database, or before the network or configuration it needs, wastes time during the incident.
Write down your top failure scenarios and, for each, the first three actions. Keep it short enough to read under stress.
Map each important system to a recovery approach. Some can be restored from backup within hours. Others cannot tolerate that and need something faster, with the extra cost that brings. Decide this system by system, not once for everything.
Document dependencies and restore order. A simple list of "database first, then application, then anything that depends on it" saves real time.
Make retention fit the corruption scenario. If a problem could go unnoticed for a week, a three-day retention will not help. Choose a window based on how long problems tend to hide, then balance it against storage cost.
Plan communication as well as technology. Decide who tells customers, who updates internal teams, and who owns the incident while others work. Confusion about roles slows recovery as much as missing data does.
Finally, review after every incident, including near misses. Ask which step took longest and what was missing, then update the plan. For timing targets, see RTO and RPO explained for cloud backups.
Bigbell supports the backup and detection parts of these scenarios. It does not restore data, run failover, or replicate across regions, so it is one part of a plan, not the plan.
For accidental deletion and corruption, its backup management feature schedules backups for servers in connected AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud accounts. You choose a daily, weekly, or monthly frequency and a retention period in days, so you can set how far back your copies reach. Each run creates an image on AWS or a snapshot on Azure and Google Cloud, and removes the copies it created that have passed retention.
Backup discovery shows each server's number of backups and days since the latest one, with "None" for servers that have no backups. The infrastructure scanner flags AWS instances with no backup as high severity, and reports RDS databases without Multi-AZ or deletion protection.
For detection, monitoring alerts reach your team through channels such as email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, WhatsApp, SMS, and calls when thresholds are crossed, and alert history gives you a record for post-incident review. Scheduled PDF reports are also available for selected projects.
Book a demo to see backup coverage and alerting on your own environment.
Which failure scenario is most common? Accidental deletion and bad changes are far more common than regional outages.
Why does retention matter for corruption? Because the newest backup may already hold the damage. Older copies let you go back further.
Does Bigbell restore backups? No. Restores are done separately.
Does Bigbell provide failover or multi-region replication? No. It schedules and discovers backups, and monitors and alerts.
Which clouds does Bigbell support for backups? AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
Can Bigbell alert my team during an incident? Yes. Monitoring alerts go to your configured channels when thresholds are crossed.
Does Bigbell keep a history of alerts? Yes. Alert history is available for review after an incident.
Do I need a full second environment? Not always. Many systems can recover from backups within an acceptable time.
What should a scenario plan include? The scenario, the owner, the first actions, restore order, and how to confirm recovery.
How often should I update the plan? After every incident and whenever systems change significantly.
Should communication be part of the plan? Yes. Decide who informs customers and teams so that recovery work is not slowed by confusion.
What is the first scenario to plan for? Accidental deletion. It is common, and a backup with sensible retention covers it.
How do I plan for a region-wide outage? Decide per system whether a slower restore elsewhere is acceptable or faster failover is worth the cost. Bigbell does not provide failover.
Who owns the plan? One named person or team, with each scenario assigned a clear owner.
Should I rehearse scenarios? Yes. Walk through one scenario each quarter, even on paper, and note which steps were unclear.
What belongs in a post-incident review? What happened, which step took longest, what was missing, and what changes to the plan follow.
Do small teams need scenario plans? Yes, in short form. A half-page per scenario is enough to be useful under stress.
Where should the scenario plan live? Somewhere reachable even if your main systems are down.
