# Disaster recovery

Disaster Recovery (DR) encompasses all the ways to recover after losing hosts or storage repositories.

In this guide we'll only see the technical aspect of DR, which is a small part of this vast topic.

## Best practices

We strongly encourage you to read some literature on this topic. Basically, you should be able to recover from a major disaster within an appropriate amount of time and minimal acceptable data loss.

To avoid a potentially very long import process (restoring all your backup VMs), we implemented a streaming feature. [Streaming allows exporting and importing at the same time](https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/vm-streaming-export-in-xenserver/).

**The goal is to have your DR VMs ready to boot on a dedicated host. This also provides a way to check if you export was successful (if the VM boots).**

![](https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/content/images/2015/10/newsolution.png)

## Schedule a DR task

Planning a DR task is very similar to planning a backup or a snapshot. The only difference is that you select a storage destination.

You DR VMs will be visible "on the other side" as soon the task is done.

### Retention

Retention, or **depth**, applies to the VM name. **If you change the VM name for any reason, it won't be rotated anymore.** This way, you can play with your DR VM without the fear of losing it.

Also, by default, the DR VM will have a "Disaster Recovery" tag.

> **Size warning**: A high retention number will lead to huge space occupation on your SR.

## Network conflicts

If you boot a copy of your production VM, be careful: if they share the same static IP, you'll have troubles.

A good way to avoid this kind of problem is to remove the network interface on the DR VM and check if the export is correctly done.