Answer.

History of the question:

Recovery testing is critically important for systems where both data integrity and operational resilience matter. Historically, this type of testing has been mainly applied to banking, financial, and medical systems where data loss is unacceptable.

Problem:

The main challenge is manually simulating failure scenarios and subsequently verifying the correctness of data recovery, processes, or states. The manual approach introduces tester errors in reproducing scenarios, underestimating rare situations, and lacks automated control tools.

Solution:

Optimal manual recovery testing is structured as follows:

1. Identify critical data and operations for recovery
2. Simulate failure: unmounting the disk, disconnecting the network, emergency shutdown
3. Assess system response: did data integrity remain intact, is correct operation possible after recovery
4. Check work-flow: the application should either correctly self-recover or provide a clear error and tools for manual recovery

Key features:

The necessity of a deep understanding of business-critical data
Recreation of a "broken" environment
Scrupulous verification of invariants before and after failure

Trick questions.

Is it enough to test recovery after just one type of failure (e.g., power loss)?

No, different failures should be simulated — network issues, database problems, hardware failures, etc. Only comprehensive testing will provide credible results.

Can recovery be considered successful if the application just restarted without errors?

No, it is essential to ensure that all information and processes are fully restored — otherwise, a "silent" data loss may occur and go undetected.

Is it necessary to back up data before recovery testing?

Absolutely! A "checkpoint" of all critical data should be made before each sabotage. This will allow for comparison before and after failures.

Common mistakes and anti-patterns

Testing only one specific failure case
Skipping the verification of all business logic after restart
Working without backing up the original data

Real-life example

Negative case

The tester simulated only a power loss without checking the loss of connection to the database. As a result, some transactions were "lost" after the failure.

Pros:

Quick and easy to conduct the test

Cons:

Critical data losses in real operation were overlooked

Positive case

The tester planned different types of failures, made backups, performed manual verification, and raised several bugs related to incorrect recovery. All critical processes were preserved.