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What are the four common disaster recovery strategies on AWS, including backup and restore and pilot light? How do backup vaults and vault lock in AWS Backup help protect against accidental or malicious data deletion? How does cross region backup copying in AWS Backup support disaster recovery objectives? How does AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery differ from traditional backup based recovery approaches?
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How should an organization test and validate its disaster recovery plan to ensure it actually works during a real event?

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Answer

Effective disaster recovery testing involves regularly performing actual failover drills, not just reviewing documentation, using tools like AWS Fault Injection Simulator to intentionally introduce failures and validate that automated recovery mechanisms behave as expected, and documenting clear runbooks with defined roles and responsibilities so that during a real event, the response is well rehearsed and confusion is minimized.
aws fis start-experiment --experiment-template-id template-12345
Real-world example A company conducts a quarterly disaster recovery drill where it deliberately fails over its production database to a secondary region during a scheduled maintenance window, verifying that both the technical process and the team's response runbook work correctly before an actual emergency occurs.

Common follow-ups: How often should disaster recovery drills be performed for critical systems?;What is AWS Fault Injection Simulator and how does it support resilience testing?

Monitoring (CloudWatch);AWS Global Infrastructure (Regions AZs & Edge Locations)
All 7 AWS Backup & Disaster Recovery questions