Backup and recovery testing are extremely important type of software testing to successful business in modern market.
If the system fails and cannot be rapidly renewed due to faulty backup and recovery procedures, companies can lose their profits in the short term prospect and customer’s trust in the longer term prospect.
Backup testing is usually exercised daily or even more often. But we can say that if systems operate without problems most of the time, recovery methods are usually not used for several months or even years.
So when recovery procedures do get used, they usually do not work. The reason is that other elements of the system have been modified and invalidated the recovery logic.
Consequently it is necessary for software testers to test recovery procedures on a periodic base or when modifications are made to the system.
Some critical applications, for instance those that conduct distributed database updates, need to view recovery from a distributed point of view. A database rollback on one hardware system may need a coordinated rollback to be conducted on another system in order to maintain the synchronization of data on both systems.