Disaster recovery plans nobody tests until it's too late
A backup you've never restored isn't a backup — it's a hope.
Most teams have a disaster recovery plan documented somewhere, and most of those plans have never actually been executed. The gap between a plan that exists on paper and a plan that's been tested under realistic conditions is exactly where real recovery efforts tend to fail.
Untested backups fail in new ways
A backup process that's never been used to actually restore a system tends to have quietly accumulated problems — a schema change the restore script doesn't handle, a dependency that's since moved, permissions that no longer match. None of these surface until the restore is actually attempted, ideally not during a real emergency.
Recovery time is a number, not a hope
A DR plan should specify a target recovery time and recovery point, and those targets should be verified by an actual timed drill, not estimated from how the plan reads on paper. The first time you learn a restore takes six hours instead of thirty minutes shouldn't be during a real outage.
Schedule the drill like any other maintenance
Disaster recovery drills that depend on someone remembering to schedule them tend to happen once, get checked off, and then quietly go stale as the system evolves. Treating them as recurring, scheduled maintenance — quarterly, or after major architecture changes — keeps the plan honest.
- An untested backup restore process tends to have accumulated hidden problems.
- Verify recovery time and recovery point targets with actual timed drills.
- Schedule DR drills recurringly — a one-time test goes stale as the system evolves.
Infrastructure as code: the discipline behind "just spin up a server"
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