Can your business recover its records? Run a small backup restore drill
Pick one business process, set a recovery target and test whether a protected backup can put usable records back in the hands of your team.
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Start with the work you need to resume
A backup report can say that a job succeeded without telling you whether anyone can rebuild tomorrow's schedule. Pick one operation the business cannot afford to lose: dispatching jobs, locating open orders or answering customers about unpaid invoices. Name the minimum records, people and tools needed to resume it. This is a drill for a normal operating day, not instructions for handling an active breach.
CISA recommends protecting critical backups with offline storage and encryption, then testing whether the backups are available and intact. The decision for the owner is what to test first. BGA's exercise starts with one process and measures whether a person can actually use the restored information.
Set two targets before running the drill
Write a maximum time to resume the selected operation and a maximum acceptable gap in the records. They answer different questions. The first is about downtime. The second concerns the point in time to which data must be recovered, the concept NIST calls the recovery point objective. A quick restore from an old copy can meet one target and fail the other.
Ask the team what happens if the gap is two hours, one day or a full weekend. If orders arrive on Saturday, a Friday export may leave a gap no one can reconstruct. Agree on a target based on the work and the available fallback, rather than adopting a default interval because it happens to be on the backup screen.
Keep the exercise separate from live work
Have an authorized operator use an isolated test destination and the approved recovery procedure. Start with synthetic records or an approved low sensitivity sample. Avoid restoring into the live account, connecting the test to customer messages or placing real customer records in a personal drive. Verify that the test operator can access the necessary recovery credentials without relying on the person or account the exercise assumes is unavailable.
Check more than whether a file opens. Have someone find a named sample job, identify its owner and next action, and match a known attachment to the record. For a software export, verify whether relationships, notes and attachments are included; a list of contacts alone may not restore the workflow. Remove the test copy under the organization's approved retention procedure.
Read a fictional result against both targets
Assume a service shop wants dispatch back within two hours and can tolerate at most four hours of missing changes. At a simulated Thursday 10 a.m. outage, the newest usable backup is from Wednesday 6 p.m. The dispatcher can read tomorrow's jobs after 45 minutes. The team meets its time target, but the 16-hour gap misses the four-hour target by 12 hours.
Suppose phone intake can reconstruct three missing bookings from an approved call log, but a changed appointment time has no second record. That is a specific operational failure, not evidence that the whole backup service is broken. The owner can test a more frequent protected copy, add a controlled manual fallback or adjust the commitment only after understanding the consequence.
Decide what to fix and what would prove it
Record the process, test owner, backup timestamp, time to usable work, checks performed, missing items and the next test date. Choose one fix for the largest gap. If the backup cannot be reached without the regular administrator, test an approved backup access path. If attachments are missing, verify whether the export includes them before buying more storage.
Use BGA's one-page SOP guide to give the recovery procedure a second operator. Run the drill again after a meaningful system or access change, using the same success criteria so the comparison means something. A passing test demonstrates recovery for the records and process exercised. It does not establish that every system is recoverable or that an incident would unfold the same way.
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