While you are working your way through these steps, and certainly once your disaster recovery plan is complete, get it all down in writing. Document every procedure that you can. This is necessary to recover from a disaster—and to recover from the loss of an essential person. (You never know when someone might win the lottery.)
Again, there are a number of documentation formats. Choose the one that makes the most sense to you.
- HTML
This is the documentation of choice for disaster recovery documentation. It is readable on any platform with a browser and therefore extremely portable. You don’t even have to edit raw HTML anymore, since you can save as HTML with any modern word processor. This makes doing documentation in HTML much easier. Just make sure that you do the code in such a way that it can be read if the hostname changes. For example, make relative references to the current server rather than hard links to a particular URL. The one downside to using HTML is that it can take up more space than the other options discussed here.
The two positive things about the Adobe PDF format are its size and its truly platform-independent nature. However, it is not editable in its native format, and not everyone has a PDF reader installed. Still, the PDF format may be a good choice for you, as long as you are aware of its limitations.
- Word processor
The word processor format is probably the easiest to manage of all these options. The only difficult part is getting a reader. However, if you choose the Microsoft Word format, any Windows laptop can read it with Wordpad. The only issue with this format is portability, although there are applications that can read Word files on Unix. Since you would have to obtain such an application prior to a disaster, though, I would suggest a more portable format.
- Paper copies
Electronic copies of documentation are much easier to keep up to date, so therefore should be your preferred method of documentation. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that you can’t print out a limited number of copies of your manual. If you keep each procedure as a separate file, you can even update your printed manual without having to reprint the entire thing.
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