Article
Backup dashboards are reassuring: green ticks, completed jobs, and a retention period that looks healthy. None of that proves you can restore the finance system before Monday, or that the restored data is usable.
Disaster recovery starts where backup ends. It asks who needs to be running, how quickly, with how much data loss, and what the team will do first.
Test the restore, not the backup
A restore test should use a real system, a real dataset, and a documented time limit. Restoring a single file is useful, but it does not test the application, the dependencies, or the people who have to make decisions under pressure.
Record the result: what worked, what was missing, and how long it took. A failed test that produces a fix is more valuable than a green dashboard that has never been challenged.
Define RPO and RTO before choosing tools
Recovery point objective (RPO) is how much data the business can afford to lose. Recovery time objective (RTO) is how quickly the service needs to be running again. Those two numbers drive the design, retention, and cost.
Without them, every backup decision is a guess. With them, you can explain why one system gets hourly replication and another gets a nightly copy.
Make the plan operational
A recovery plan needs named owners, contact paths, dependencies, and a communication step for staff and customers. It should live somewhere the team can reach when the usual systems are down.
Review it after every test and every significant change. The plan that worked last year may not match the environment you run today.