Most small teams have backups. Almost none have a restore. A backup you have never restored is a rumor you tell yourself — and the day you need it is the worst possible day to find out it was a story.
I write operational playbooks for small ops teams (250+ articles on this profile), and this is the gap I find most often in audits: the backup runs on schedule, the dashboard is green, and nobody has ever once pulled a file back out of it.
The drill
Pick a quiet Friday hour. Do this once a quarter, minimum.
- Choose a random live file. Don't pick the one you know works. Ask someone else to pick. Random is the point.
- Restore it to a scratch location. Never on top of the live copy — you're testing the backup, not betting the business on it.
- Time it. Write the number down. This number is your real RTO, and it belongs in your incident plan, not in a vendor brochure.
- Open the file. Backups can restore corrupted. Checksums lie less than dashboards. Verify the content is readable and complete.
- Write the gap down. Took 4 hours instead of 20 minutes? Missing credentials? Only one person knows the storage password? That list IS your next ops sprint.
Why timing matters more than anything
When the outage actually comes, your clients don't ask how often you backed up. They ask: "when will it be back?" If you have never measured the restore, your answer is a guess — and guesses under pressure are expensive.
The full kit
I packaged the complete restore drill — plus the incident timeline template, the offline fallback checklist, and the post-incident report format — as a downloadable kit. It is the practical core of everything I publish here:
→ First 30 Minutes: Emergency Response Kit
Running more of your ops on automation already? The Automation Starter Pack covers the scheduled-jobs side, and the Ops Starter Kit has the daily checklists that keep the drill from being forgotten.
Tell me your stack in the comments — database, files, or full VM — and I'll tell you what your restore drill should look like.
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