Check your backups cover the working service

What this means for your practice

Define recovery around the working service, including its settings and necessary information. Ask the responsible owners to confirm how each part can be restored.

How to review the arrangement

Start with an empty authorised test environment and a representative journey. What is needed before a visitor can complete it again? Ask the maintainer to identify items restored by other suppliers and access required. This reveals gaps that a list of successful backup jobs may not show.

Ask what a replacement maintainer would need

Imagine an authorised replacement team starting with the recovery materials. They may need website files, images, settings, information records and access to services managed elsewhere. Ask the current supplier to explain how those pieces fit together and which ones its backup actually covers.

Choose a representative task, such as viewing service information and completing a test enquiry. Work backwards from that task to identify what must be available for it to function after recovery. A backup of pages alone may leave the form destination or a necessary connection unconfigured. Agree who supplies and verifies each missing part. Keep the recovery instructions with appropriate access and review them when the website changes. The purpose of the exercise is to find practical gaps before an outage, while there is time to resolve them through the responsible owners and test the updated arrangement safely.

How to check the result

Measure the proportion of required recovery components with a documented and tested restoration route.