Wikipedia defines Disaster Recovery (DR) as "the process, policies and procedures of restoring operations critical to the resumption of business, including regaining access to data (records, hardware, software, etc.), communications (incoming, outgoing, toll-free, fax, etc.), workspace, and other business processes after a natural or human-induced disaster."
In the world of IT, DR usually involves redundant hardware such as web server load-balancing or server clustering and data duplication via the creation and restoration of backup files. Some companies will spend millions of dollars purchasing, developing, and testing a DR infrastructure that they fervently hope that they will never have to use. All too many organizations risk the loss of crucial business information and capital by not having any sort of DR plans in place at all.
Often DR falls under the jurisdiction of your IT administrators, the same people who installed, configured, and keep your SharePoint system up and running. But one fact about SharePoint that often gets overlooked is that out of the box it provides two tools to its users that can be used to save your content in the event that something unfortunate happens to it. Granted, it may be a bit of a stretch to put these tools in the same category as enterprise-caliber tape backup hardware, but when used properly they can provide very similar capabilities with little IT professional intervention
First, let's talk about the Recycle Bin. If you haven't spent a lot of time poking around a SharePoint site, the only Recycle Bin you're probably familiar with is on your Windows desktop. But with the latest release of SharePoint, Recycle Bins are included and activated by default in every SharePoint site you create. And they act very similarly to the local Recycle Bin on your desktop. If you delete a file in your SharePoint site it is not gone forever only to be retrieved via some arcane voodoo act performed by your SharePoint administrator. Instead, it is automatically sent to your site's Recycle Bin until the Bin is emptied. The Recycle Bin can hold not only deleted documents, but also document libraries, list items, and lists that are deleted from a SharePoint site.
Here are a couple of things to keep in mind about SharePoint Recycle Bins:
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Although they are enabled by default in SharePoint, they can be turned off. So if you don't see one in your site, ask your SharePoint administrator about its status.
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The items in your site's Recycle Bin will count against your site's storage quota. So if your site is running out of space, check your Recycle Bin to make sure you're not tying up a bunch of storage with unneeded items.
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By default items will be deleted from the Recycle Bin once they've been in there for 30 days, but this value can be modified by your SharePoint administrator.
Finally, the SharePoint Recycle Bin is referred to as a "two-stage" Recycle Bin. This means that when you empty your Recycle Bin, or an item is removed from it because its been in there for a while, it still is not gone forever. In Windows, when you empty your Recycle Bin the items in it are gone forever (barring the use of a specialized recovery tool and some fervent hoping that the affected disk sectors have not be overwritten). But in SharePoint when you empty a Recycle Bin, the items in it are moved to its parent Site Collection's top-level Recycle Bin, just in case you didn't really mean to delete it. This means that while the item is in the Site Collection's Recycle Bin it can be restored by a site collection administrator.
Like the first-stage site Recycle Bin, items will be removed from the Site Collection's Recycle Bin once they have been in it past the Bin's retention period. And, just like the first-stage Bin, by default that value is set to 30 days but it can be modified by a SharePoint administrator. Once an item has been removed from the Site Collection's Recycle Bin, it's pretty much gone; the only way it can be retrieved is via a restore of a backup for the site (if such a backup has been made).
Since this post is already plenty long, I'll cover document versioning in a subsequent post.