Is It Crazy to Have a Physical Disaster Recovery Manual? NASA Doesn’t Think So.

Every once in a while, I catch myself thinking about something that sounds borderline insane in the modern DevOps world.
This week’s thought was this:

“Should we have a physical, printed Disaster Recovery manual?”

In 2025, when everything is cloud-first, Git-managed, automated, and continuously updated, the idea of printing a binder feels almost rebellious. It even feels… analogue.

But here’s the twist:

It’s not crazy. It’s disciplined.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realised something uncomfortable:

NASA would absolutely have one. And we should too.

Digital DR Plans Fail In Digital Ways

Most companies technically have a DR plan.
It lives in Confluence, buried under outdated pages and broken diagrams. No one reads it. No one tests it. No one knows where it is in a real emergency.

And ironically, the moment you need your DR plan is often the moment you lose access to:

  • your wiki
  • your cloud console
  • your SSO
  • your MFA
  • your internal network
  • your VPN
  • your Slack/Teams
  • your password manager
  • your dashboards

If your identity provider goes down, your “single source of truth” might be unavailable for hours.

If your DNS is burning, you might not even reach your internal documentation.

If your account is locked or MFA is broken, you’re stuck staring at a login screen while production collapses.

Digital systems fail elegantly… until they fail catastrophically.
A printed manual can’t crash, can’t lock you out, and can’t return a 503.

NASA Has Used Physical Checklists for Decades — Because They Work

Here’s where it gets interesting.

NASA is arguably the most technologically advanced organisation on Earth, and yet:

  • Astronauts carry printed checklists in space.
  • Mission Control uses physical binders for emergency procedures.
  • Apollo 13 literally survived because the crew had physical manuals with them.

When the spacecraft was failing, digital systems useless, oxygen low, and power almost gone, it was printed procedures that guided them through the sequence to stay alive.

Why?

Because NASA understands something most cloud-native teams forget:

Under pressure, memory fails. Digital tools fail. Humans need grounding.

A physical binder is not nostalgia — it’s engineered resilience.

So What Goes Into a Physical DR Manual?

This part is crucial.
A physical DR manual is not a printout of your Terraform, IAM policies, DNS config, or container registry.

That would be outdated in a month.

Instead, it contains what never changes during a disaster:

✔️ 1. DR priorities and principles

How to stabilise the situation.
In what order to recover systems.
What “good” looks like.

✔️ 2. Roles, contacts, and escalation paths

  • Phone numbers
  • Emergency emails
  • Vendor support contacts
  • Cloud provider escalation lines
  • Who declares DR
  • Who leads
  • Who approves what

When your identity provider is down, this is gold.

✔️ 3. Communication when your main channels fail

  • Backup communication tools
  • SMS groups
  • Offline WhatsApp channels
  • Satellite phone instructions (if you have them)

A DR plan is worthless if nobody can talk.

✔️ 4. Where critical things live

Not their contents — just the locations:

  • Backup vaults
  • Physical drives
  • Cold storage
  • Third-party repositories
  • Secrets vaults
  • Break-glass credentials (sealed)

✔️ 5. Architecture overview

Not detailed YAML — just enough to orient yourself.
A map, not a blueprint.

✔️ 6. Decision trees and runbook index

  • When to escalate
  • When to declare DR
  • When to failover
  • When to roll back

And an index of where detailed runbooks are stored once systems come back online.

That’s it.

The physical DR manual is clarity under stress, not technical minutiae.

Why This Isn’t Overkill — It’s Leadership

People assume DevOps is all automation, IaC, and pipelines.
But real DevOps — the kind you don’t appreciate until something breaks — is about:

  • resilience
  • preparation
  • discipline
  • thinking ahead
  • removing single points of failure
  • ensuring humans can act when machines cannot

And there’s nothing more “DevOps” than reducing fragility.

A physical DR manual is a simple answer to a complex failure mode:
What if we can’t access the digital systems that tell us what to do next?

NASA doesn’t rely on digital-only.
Pilots don’t rely on digital-only.
Surgeons don’t rely on digital-only.
Emergency services don’t rely on digital-only.

And neither should we.

Are We Crazy to Print a DR Binder? No. We’re Prepared.

If someone mocks the idea, that tells you they’ve never been in a real outage.

It tells you they’ve never been on a bridge call where identity is failing, the dashboard is dead, and everyone is scrambling to remember procedures buried in some wiki.

It tells you they’ve never watched a system collapse with no visibility and no access.

The truly experienced know:

When the digital world is burning, paper is the one thing that still works.

This isn’t obsession.
This isn’t paranoia.
This isn’t nostalgia.

This is professional discipline.

And yes — NASA would absolutely approve.

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