How do you test disaster recovery in DevOps?
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Quick Answer
Regularly rehearse: run failover/failback drills, restore backups to verify they work, and simulate outages (game days, chaos experiments) to confirm you actually meet your RTO/RPO — a backup you have never restored is not a backup.
Detailed Answer
Testing turns DR plans from paper into proven capability. Schedule game days that fail over to a secondary region, time the recovery against RTO, validate data integrity against RPO, and run chaos experiments to expose hidden dependencies. Automate and document, then feed findings back into the plan. Untested DR routinely fails when it is finally needed.
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Interview Tip
The memorable line: a backup you have never restored is not a backup — DR must be rehearsed, not assumed.
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