Backups are only useful if you can restore them

Plan a small restore drill and capture evidence of recovery.

Set recovery objectives

Agree on a recovery point objective (acceptable data loss) and recovery time objective (acceptable outage). Identify the application owner, dependencies, backup location, encryption keys, and the person authorized to perform a restore.

Use an isolated target

Restore into a separate environment that cannot send production emails, run production jobs, or overwrite live data. Confirm storage and permissions before starting. Use your backup product’s documented restore workflow; there is no universal restore command.

Validate the application, not just the archive

Check file counts and representative checksums where appropriate, but also start the application in isolation and exercise a known workflow. For a database-backed app, validate database consistency and application-level records with the owner.

Record what recovery actually took

Capture the backup timestamp, restore start and finish, validation results, and missing prerequisites. Compare the measured recovery point and time with the agreed objectives. Assign an owner to each gap and schedule the next drill.