Chillingworth'sIT Consulting

9 July 2026

Why backups aren't the same as disaster recovery

A backup is a copy. Disaster recovery is the ability to get the business working again. Those are not the same job.

Plenty of organisations have backups. Fewer have ever restored one under time pressure. Fewer still have decided, in writing, how long the business can be down and how much data it can afford to lose.

A backup that has never been tested is a rumour. A backup of the wrong machine is worse. A backup that takes three days to restore is not a recovery plan for a company that needs to invoice tomorrow.

Disaster recovery asks different questions. Which systems are actually critical? In what order do they come back? Who has the credentials? What happens if the building, the tenant, or the cloud region is the thing that failed? How do staff work in the meantime?

If you cannot answer those questions without a meeting, you do not have disaster recovery. You have a backup job and some optimism. That is a fixable problem — but only before you need it.

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