What is Cold Standby?

What is Hot Standby?

Cold standby is a disaster recovery technique used in system design where you have a redundant system that acts as a backup for your primary system. The key thing here is that the secondary system is powered down and inactive until it’s needed.

Here’s a breakdown of cold standby:

Purpose: Provides a backup system in case the main system fails.
State of the secondary system: Powered down and inactive until needed.
Data backups: Regular backups are required to keep the cold standby system’s data up-to-date. However, these backups might not be in real-time, so there could be some data loss.
Activation time: When the primary system fails, it takes time to boot up the cold standby system and restore data, leading to downtime.

Cold Standby vs. Hot Standby

While planning for disaster recovery, the choice between Cold Standby and Hot Standby are two key strategies. Imagine your computer crashing suddenly, Cold Standby means you have a spare computer ready, but it’s turned off. You’d need to switch it on and transfer everything manually, causing a delay. On the other hand, with Hot Standby, that spare computer is already on, synced, and ready to take over instantly. It’s like having a backup dancer on stage, already in sync with the main performer.

Important Topics for Cold Standby vs. Hot Standby