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The Backup Vault: Bring Your Data Back From the Dead: Build a Recovery Plan That Works

Written by Preston Miller | Sep 10, 2026, 12:00:02 PM

A backup is a copy.

A recovery plan answers a much more important question:

How do we get the business running again?

Identify Critical Systems

Not everything needs to return at the same time.

Determine which systems are essential to operations and prioritize them.

Define How Much Data You Can Lose

Could your business recreate an hour of work?

A day?

Your backup frequency should reflect that answer.

Define How Long You Can Be Down

If a system takes three days to restore but the business can only tolerate four hours of downtime, you have a problem.

Find that out now.

Protect the Backups

Attackers understand backups too.

Your backup strategy should be designed so a compromised production environment doesn't automatically compromise your recovery copies.

Test Recovery

This may be the most important step.

Don't assume backups work because a dashboard says "successful."

Test restoration.

A backup you've never successfully restored is a promise you haven't verified.

When disaster strikes, you don't want to discover the Backup Vault is empty.