Three approaches to disaster recovery with different cost and recovery time trade-offs.
Cold standby:
- Backups stored, no running infrastructure
- Recovery: Hours to days
- Cost: Lowest (storage only)
Warm standby:
- Scaled-down version running
- Recovery: Minutes to hours
- Cost: Moderate (partial infrastructure)
Hot standby:
- Full replica running in sync
- Recovery: Seconds to minutes
- Cost: Highest (duplicate infrastructure)
Choose based on RPO/RTO requirements and budget.