Businesses invest a lot of money and effort into data backup and recovery plans for simple user events, as well as emergency events like natural disasters. However, without adequate testing, it’s hard to know whether any backup and recovery plan will work. Testing, in some senses, completes the circle when it comes to preparing for natural disasters or other crises.

Ideally, companies should be able to test their actual live systems for correct backup and recovery functionality. However, this kind of testing, which is sometimes called "live testing" or "interruption testing," can be intrusive and hard to complete. Sometimes, a company can set up dummy systems, although experts caution against simply testing "like environments" and not actually analyzing the backup and recovery systems themselves.

In terms of the actual work done in backup and recovery tests, executives or other leaders can plan general testing such as scenario-based operations testing and testing for backup power sources. In terms of actually testing IT systems for backup and recovery, these tests may be as diverse as simulating the loss of simple data files or an entire server; looking at backup processes for operating systems, databases and applications; or testing failback and failover processes and looking for accurate IT responses to a range of events.