Disaster Recovery Plan

Overview

A disaster recovery plan describes the scope, priorities, governance, resources, and procedures for returning essential services to a trusted state. It should identify critical wallet, custody, treasury, ledger, monitoring, communication, and vendor functions together with their dependencies.

The plan establishes recovery time and recovery point objectives, incident authority, alternate personnel, backup architecture, key-recovery methods, restoration order, and decision gates. It should address both availability failures and integrity failures, because a reachable backup may still contain corrupted data or compromised secrets.

Plans need named owners, version control, secure distribution, training, and scheduled exercises. Test results should measure actual restoration time, data completeness, signing capability, reconciliation accuracy, and unresolved dependencies. A plan that has never been exercised is an assumption, not evidence of recoverability. Changes to networks, wallets, providers, or authorization policies should trigger review.

Evidence for Disaster Recovery Plan should preserve incident time, affected identifiers, last known state, claimant and approver checks, backup or share version, actions performed, credentials revoked, assets verified, discrepancies found, and final owner acceptance. For Disaster Recovery Plan, sensitive recovery material must not appear in the incident record.

For Disaster Recovery Plan, important risks include fraudulent recovery requests, guardian collusion, unavailable shares, outdated backups, compromised cloud accounts, missing derivation metadata, untested procedures, and simultaneous loss of primary and backup systems. For Disaster Recovery Plan, independent storage and periodic exercises reduce correlated failure but introduce their own custody obligations.

The scope of Disaster Recovery Plan should identify the protected wallet, key, account, service, or business process; the triggering failure; who may declare the incident; which identity and entitlement evidence is required; and the recovery point and recovery time objectives that govern restoration.