Burn It Down: A Disaster Recovery Drill

What you will build

A stack you can lose completely and get back, with a recovery time you measured instead of guessed.

Starting point: you only need a Vultr account. This challenge is self-contained, so you can do it without having done any other.

The plan

1. Define the stack in Terraform: instance, database, firewall, storage
2. Take a backup of the data and store it off the instance
3. Write down your target recovery time
4. Run terraform destroy and start the timer
5. Rebuild and restore, then confirm the data is intact
6. Record the real recovery time and what slowed you down

terraform destroy -auto-approve
time ./restore.sh

How you will be judged

• Everything rebuilt from code and backups, nothing by hand
• Data verified after restore
• Honest timeline with what you would fix

Run this on your own throwaway resources, never on anything real.