Backups and Recovery
A backup is a recoverable copy of data; recovery is the tested process that restores usable service from it. Set recovery targets from business consequence and prove restoration regularly rather than merely enabling backups.
What You Will Be Able to Decide
- Explain backups and recovery in product and business terms.
- Apply this decision: Set recovery targets from business consequence and prove restoration regularly rather than merely enabling backups.
- Recognise this material risk: backups exist but are incomplete, inaccessible, or too slow to restore when needed.
- Ask a consultant for evidence rather than reassurance.
A founder is deciding how the product should remember information and preserve its meaning over time.
A backup is a recoverable copy of data; recovery is the tested process that restores usable service from it.
A consultant can recommend and implement the technical approach. The founder still needs to decide which outcome matters, which risk is acceptable, and what evidence is sufficient.
Start with the Consequence
A founder is deciding how the product should remember information and preserve its meaning over time.
The immediate question is backups and recovery. The technical label matters only because it changes a product decision, a responsibility, or the evidence required before launch.
Technical term
Backups and Recovery
A backup is a recoverable copy of data; recovery is the tested process that restores usable service from it.
Treat it like a clause in a commercial agreement: its value comes from making expectations and consequences clear, not from sounding formal.
Turn the Term into Evidence
Start with the product consequence, then choose the simplest technical treatment that protects it. A longer tool list is not a stronger plan.
For this decision, the useful standard is that the data model can represent the real business rules without ambiguity or silent corruption.
- Make the decision explicit: Set recovery targets from business consequence and prove restoration regularly rather than merely enabling backups.
- Ask what evidence would show that the chosen approach works.
- Name the person or provider responsible when the approach fails.
- Record the result in the data model and recovery plan.
Match the Control to the Consequence
Set recovery targets from business consequence and prove restoration regularly rather than merely enabling backups.
The principal risk is that backups exist but are incomplete, inaccessible, or too slow to restore when needed. This does not require the most expensive possible solution. It requires the consequence to be understood and the control to match it.
- Describe the user or business outcome that must be protected.
- Identify the most credible failure and its consequence.
- Compare the simplest adequate approach with one realistic alternative.
- Set a review point for when the decision may need to change.
Evidence Compared with Assumption
Warning Signs
- Nobody can explain how backups and recovery changes a user or business outcome.
- The proposal does not address this risk: backups exist but are incomplete, inaccessible, or too slow to restore when needed.
- The only evidence is a successful demonstration of the easiest path.
- The decision has no named owner, boundary, or review point.
- A provider-specific feature is being mistaken for a permanent product requirement.
Questions to Ask a Consultant
- What decision are we making about backups and recovery?
- Which user or business outcome does the recommendation protect?
- How have we reduced or accepted this risk: backups exist but are incomplete, inaccessible, or too slow to restore when needed.
- What evidence can I review without relying on the original implementer?
- What is deliberately deferred, and when will it be reconsidered?
- Who owns the accounts, data, documentation, and recovery process?
Key takeaway
Key Takeaway
A backup is a recoverable copy of data; recovery is the tested process that restores usable service from it. The founder's job is to make the consequence explicit; the consultant's job is to recommend and demonstrate a proportionate implementation.