Got hit by penguin - start over or wait?

they are still playing around with this update , seriously it takes days even a week or so to get close to settling.

I also got hit by Penguin 2.1, but no manually penalty, i am waiting because still SERP's are dancing very much once it settle down then decide what to do, but the question is what we will in future for avoiding this type of updates, my site is not a throw away site its a business site, so first of all how to recover and what type of back-links we will use in future which are safe and comes under white hat.....