Running a recovery drill without disrupting your team

The reason most businesses never actually test their disaster recovery plan isn't laziness, it's fear that testing it will itself cause an outage. A drill done right shouldn't touch anything your team relies on day to day. Here's how Recovery Ready's quarterly drills are structured so testing your plan doesn't become a reason to avoid it.

Drills restore into a scratch environment, not production

A recovery drill restores a real slice of your replicated data into an isolated scratch environment, separate from your live systems. Nobody's production database, file share, or application gets touched. This is what makes it possible to run drills on a regular schedule instead of treating a recovery test as a rare, high-stakes event.

Scheduling a drill

1. Pick a recurring window with your account team, quarterly is the default, that avoids your business's known busy periods.
2. Confirm which systems or data sets should be included in that quarter's drill; you don't need to restore everything every time.
3. The drill runs in the scratch environment at the scheduled time. Your team doesn't need to be present for the restore itself.

What actually gets checked

• Whether the restore completes successfully within your agreed RTO target
• Whether the restored data is intact and usable, not just present
• Whether the recovery point meets your RPO target, how recent the restored data actually is

For more on what these two targets mean and how to set them, see the RPO and RTO guide.

After the drill: what's in the report

You get a short report after each drill: what was restored, how long it took, whether it met your RTO target, and anything that needs attention before next quarter. If a drill surfaces a gap, for example a system that wasn't included in replication, that becomes the action item for the next cycle rather than something discovered mid-crisis.