Every DBA has inherited a backup strategy they didn’t design.
The jobs exist and they run successfully. And yet, if someone asked you, right now, to guarantee how much data you’d lose or how long recovery would take, would you confidently know the answer?
Backups are not the goal.
As DBAs, it’s easy to fall into the trap of measuring success by job history. Seeing green or the lack of red always feels good. But none of that matters if restore time exceeds business tolerance or if you don’t know how to effectively recover the service.
Don’t ask yourself, “are backups running?”, ask “can I actually recover this system under pressure?”
RPO and RTO
These terms are something that you need to know:
- RPO = how much data the business can afford to lose. This is often political rather than technical.
- RTO = how long it takes you to restore service. This is usually underestimated.
RPO
Businesses love to say they want zero data loss, but they’re not always aware of what it takes or how much it costs to get there. That’s why it’s so important for the business and the techies to sit down together and agree on what’s realistically achievable within the constraints they’ve got.
And those conversations need to happen in language the business understands. Whatever gets agreed should be written down, signed off, and treated as a living rule not just an assumption. Remember, the right level of protection isn’t the same everywhere; it can differ between environments, applications, and even individual databases.
RTO
If your setup technically meets the agreed RPO, it’s usually the RTO where things start to wobble.
On paper, you might be able to restore a database in ten minutes but that’s assuming nothing gets in the way. Most people measure RTO by the restore command alone, which is only a slice of the real process.
The real RTO includes everything around it: logging into the environment, finding the right backups, restoring multiple databases, fixing permissions, validating data, and coordinating with whoever else needs to be involved. And let’s be honest if you’ve been dragged out of bed at 3am to do it, you’re probably not operating at 100%.
If you’ve never timed a full, end‑to‑end restore, then your RTO is just a theory. And theoretical RTOs don’t survive real outages. When you must estimate, it’s always safer to overestimate than underestimate.
Document the full process, test it properly, practise it under pressure, and make sure you know who to call when things go sideways. Confidence in a restore only comes from having done it for real or as close as you can get.
Restore testing is not optional DBA work
If you’re not testing your restores, your backups are basically an unproven theory.
A backup job saying “Success” doesn’t mean the backup is usable. Corruption, storage glitches, partial backups, the wrong recovery model, expired credentials – they can all turn what looks like a perfectly healthy backup into something you can’t restore when it matters.
Restore testing isn’t about ticking a compliance box. It’s about removing uncertainty. When restores are part of your regular routine, you build confidence and if restores barely ever happen, they turn into high‑stress, high‑risk events.
You shouldn’t hope your backups work – you should know they do.
Run regular restore tests and DR drills and automate whatever you can. Script out restore steps, use tools like DBATools, and make practising disaster recovery part of normal operations.
And remember, some of this work might already happen naturally through environment refreshes or other procedures, so make sure you’re not repeating effort unnecessarily.
If restores aren’t tested, then the backups are unproven.
Backups are a DBA promise to the business
Every backup strategy is an implicit promise. You’re promising how much data can be lost, how long systems can be down, and how confidently recovery can be executed. That promise is tested not by success messages, but by failure scenarios. Document RPOs, measure RTOs, test restores and automate wherever possible.
If you’re not fully confident in your recovery, why not speak to Coeo about a Restore Confidence Review and see exactly where you stand?
Find out more about Coeo’s Restore Confidence Review service.