autorecovery

Autorecovery refers to automatic restoration of a system, application, or data after a fault, crash, or interruption, with the goal of resuming operation with minimal human intervention. It is a key component of high availability and fault-tolerant design and is used across software, databases, operating systems, and storage systems.

Core concepts include failure detection (health checks, heartbeats), recovery actions (restart, failover to a secondary instance, rollback to a known good state, or restoration from backups), and metrics such as recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). Autorecovery relies on techniques like checkpointing, write-ahead logs, journaling, data replication, and periodic snapshots.

In practice, implementations vary by domain. Applications may auto-recover by restarting after an unhandled exception or by loading the last autosaved state, as in auto-recovery features in word processors. Databases use crash recovery to bring data to a consistent state using logs. Operating systems can restart services automatically on failure. Container orchestration systems, such as Kubernetes, automatically restart or reschedule failed pods; storage systems use RAID, snapshots, and replication to restore data after corruption or outage.

Limitations include the possibility of data loss (quantified by RPO), partial or inconsistent state after recovery if not carefully designed, and added complexity or performance overhead. Thorough testing and clear recovery objectives are essential for effective autorecovery.

Related concepts include high availability, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, checkpointing, and failover.