What Is Disaster Recovery? Planning for the Worst

Disaster recovery (DR) is the strategy and processes for restoring infrastructure and data after a catastrophic event — a data center failure, ransomware attack, natural disaster, or a deployment that corrupts data.

Key DR Metrics

• RTO (Recovery Time Objective): how long you can be down before the impact is unacceptable
• RPO (Recovery Point Objective): how much data you can afford to lose (e.g., max 1 hour of data)

Fly.io and DR

Fly runs your VMs across multiple physical hosts in each region and spreads instances across availability zones. If a host fails, Fly migrates your VMs automatically. For multi-region deployments, you can run OpenClaw instances in multiple regions and use Fly's volume replication.

OpenClaw-Specific DR

Your OpenClaw config is stored in Git and in the VM's volume. The Git repo is your offsite backup. If a Fly app is destroyed, you can recreate it from your openclaw.json and redeploy.

Practical DR Setup

1. Keep your openclaw.json in Git (offsite backup of config)
2. Use Fly's volume snapshots for data persistence
3. Document your recovery runbook (step-by-step restore process)
4. Test restores periodically — a plan you haven't tested is unproven