Backups and Recovery
Backups preserve recoverable copies; recovery combines people, access, procedures, and tested restoration into resumed service. Set business-led recovery objectives and conduct restoration exercises with someone other than the original implementer.
What You Will Be Able to Decide
- Explain backups and recovery in product and business terms.
- Apply this decision: Set business-led recovery objectives and conduct restoration exercises with someone other than the original implementer.
- Recognise this material risk: the company pays for backups but lacks credentials, instructions, or time to restore them.
- Ask a consultant for evidence rather than reassurance.
A founder is clarifying who controls the product and how the company will respond when something goes wrong.
Backups preserve recoverable copies; recovery combines people, access, procedures, and tested restoration into resumed service.
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.
The Practical Question
A founder is clarifying who controls the product and how the company will respond when something goes wrong.
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
Backups preserve recoverable copies; recovery combines people, access, procedures, and tested restoration into resumed service.
Treat it like a clause in a commercial agreement: its value comes from making expectations and consequences clear, not from sounding formal.
What a Sound Approach Establishes
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 access, ownership, recovery, and response responsibilities are explicit and can be exercised without one individual.
- Make the decision explicit: Set business-led recovery objectives and conduct restoration exercises with someone other than the original implementer.
- 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 security, ownership, and handover record.
A Decision Framework
Set business-led recovery objectives and conduct restoration exercises with someone other than the original implementer.
The principal risk is that the company pays for backups but lacks credentials, instructions, or time to restore them. 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.
What Confidence Should Be Based On
Warning Signs
- Nobody can explain how backups and recovery changes a user or business outcome.
- The proposal does not address this risk: the company pays for backups but lacks credentials, instructions, or time to restore them.
- 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: the company pays for backups but lacks credentials, instructions, or time to restore them.
- 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
Backups preserve recoverable copies; recovery combines people, access, procedures, and tested restoration into resumed service. The founder's job is to make the consequence explicit; the consultant's job is to recommend and demonstrate a proportionate implementation.