Learn what backup and disaster recovery means, how BDR works, and why it matters for reducing downtime and data loss. Backup and disaster recovery (BDR) is what keeps data loss from becoming a business-wide catastrophe. And to protect their business, IT teams need to ask if they can recover the right data, in the right order, fast enough for the business to keep operating. A backup can preserve a copy of a file, database, or workload, but disaster recovery is what brings the wider service back online.