Disaster recovery involves three stages: disaster recovery, backup systems, and whole system replacement. Disaster recovery is the process of restoring systems after an outage caused by events like natural disasters, fires, or cyberattacks. Backup systems like cloud storage or USB drives allow copying of all data so it can be restored anytime. Whole system replacement involves replacing hardware if needed after a disaster. Companies should have a disaster recovery plan to quickly restore systems and data if a disruption occurs.