Practical checklist
Recovery exercise planning checklist
Plan a safe restore of one service that matters to the business. Define who may recover it, what usable recovery means and how you will record the observed result before expanding the exercise.
The challenge
Start with the work you need to recover.
A backup inventory alone cannot set the business priority. Identify the service, its dependencies and the people who can restore it, then agree a meaningful recovery check.
Work through these checks
- Name the workload, data owner and business workflow.
- Set the recovery time and data-loss objectives.
- Map identity, application, platform and supplier dependencies.
- Confirm backup scope, retention and access separation.
- Choose an isolated, authorized restore destination.
- Define test timing, stop conditions and communications.
- Verify usable data or service after restore.
- Record measured time, data age and limitations.
- Clean up and restore the intended protection.
- Assign corrective actions and the next exercise date.
Questions to bring to discovery
- Can a backup owner retrieve the agreed recovery data?
- Can the business validate the restored result?
- Which dependency is absent from the current recovery plan?
The intended result
Prepare an exercise with a useful acceptance result.
Identify the workload, objective, authorized people and safe restore destination. The checklist supports a rehearsal that records usable output and observed limits.
Choose the first workload to rehearse.
Bring your business objective and backup scope to a bounded recovery discussion.