IT Disaster Recovery Testing Guide

Why Test DR Plans?

A DR plan that has never been tested will fail when you need it. Testing identifies gaps, builds confidence, and ensures the team knows what to do.

Testing Levels

• Tabletop (quarterly): Walk through the plan with the response team. Discuss scenarios. Identify gaps. No actual systems affected.
• Partial test (semi-annually): Restore a single non-critical system from backup. Verify functionality. Measure restore time.
• Full drill (annually): Simulate complete site failure. Fail over to secondary site. Run operations for 24 hours. Fail back.

What to Measure

• Actual RTO vs target RTO
• Actual RPO vs target RPO
• Time to detect the "disaster"
• Communication effectiveness
• Team familiarity with procedures