Introduction Every startup says they have backups. Very few have actually tested restoring from them. Even fewer have a documented disaster recovery plan with defined recovery objectives. Then something goes wrong - a developer runs a destructive migration against production, a region goes down, ransomware encrypts your EBS volumes - and the team discovers their "backup strategy" was an untested assumption. Disaster recovery does not have to be complicated or expensive, especially on AWS. But it does have to be intentional. This guide walks through building a real DR strategy: defining your recovery objectives, implementing the 3-2-1 backup rule, configuring AWS Backup, setting up cross-region replication, and most importantly, testing that everything actually works. Understanding RTO and RPO Before you configure a single backup, you need two numbers: Recovery Point Objective (RPO): How much data can you afford to lose? If your RPO is 1 hour, you need backups at least every hour.…