Business Continuity
Backup is a copy of data. Disaster recovery is the tested ability to operate again. How the two differ, and why companies with good backups still lose a week.
Reviewed 2026-08-01 by the Machina IT engineering team.
Backup is a copy of data stored somewhere else. Disaster recovery is the architecture, plan and tested process for getting systems and people working again after a failure. A company can have perfect backups and still be down for a week, because copying data and restoring operations are different problems.
Restoring a server from backup requires hardware to restore onto, time to move the data, a license and configuration to rebuild, and someone who knows the order in which systems must come up.
If the plan is 'we have backups', the recovery timeline is whatever it happens to be — usually days.
Common mistakes
Common questions
Depending on architecture and failure type, booting a recent image locally can restore a critical server in minutes. Large database restores or full site loss take considerably longer.
It's a copy, not a recovery capability. The question is how you run the workload while the primary is rebuilt.
We review your network, security posture, cloud tenant and recovery plan, then hand you a plain-language report of what we found and what it means for the business.
