Every child who has been through school knows how to leave a building in an emergency, and none of them worked it out on the day. They practised it, in the ordinary way, until it was boring.

Recovering your business from a data loss deserves the same treatment, and almost never gets it.

Run the drill

Pick a quiet morning. Choose one system that would genuinely hurt to lose, the accounting file, the customer database, the shared drive. Then, without touching production, recover it from backup as though it were gone.

Watch for the things that only surface under real conditions:

• Does anyone know where the backups live, and who has the credentials?
• Does the restore actually complete, or does it fail two hours in?
• How current is the recovered copy, really?
• Do the applications reconnect, or does something else need reconfiguring first?
• How long did the whole thing take, start to finish?

Write down what broke

Something always does. A missing password, a step nobody documented, a system that was never in scope. That list is the actual output of the exercise, and it is worth more than the plan you started with.

Then do it again

Once a year, at minimum, and after anything significant changes. A drill that has not been run since the last server was replaced is not a drill, it is a memory.

The businesses that recover quickly are not lucky, and they are not the ones with the most expensive tools. They are the ones for whom the day was not the first attempt.

We run recovery drills for our clients as part of their support plan. Call 704.470.9009 to arrange one.