Everything ITDrill has published, grouped by the question you are probably trying to answer. Each entry says who it is for and when to read it. None of it tests or certifies your systems; it explains method.
Starting a recovery programme
Designing a recovery drill is for the manager or engineer who has been told to run a DR test and needs to turn that into a scoped experiment with a hypothesis, a scenario, safety rules and a measurement plan. Read it first if you have never run a drill.
The drill planner is for anyone who wants a concrete starting plan: it asks about your current practice and the systems in scope, then proposes a first exercise, roles, success criteria and evidence list, with the reasoning shown. Use it after the drills article, or instead of it if you want to see an example plan before reading the method. It is a worksheet and verifies nothing.
The one-page drill checklist is for the person running the day. It is printable, and it works without any of the other material.
Proving that backups come back
Backup validation is for backup administrators and the people who fund them. Read it when you need to separate integrity checks from restore tests and from protection against deletion, or when someone asks whether your backups would survive a compromise of administrator credentials.
Restore testing is for engineers who see successful backup jobs every day and want to know what those prove. It sets out a ladder of checks from “the job reported success” to “a service was restored and timed”, with commands and arithmetic. Read it before scheduling your first real restore.
Setting and checking targets
RTO and RPO is for managers and stakeholders who must write recovery targets and for engineers who must say whether the setup meets them. Read it when a number is going into a document, or when a stated target has never been compared with a measured one.
Writing and rehearsing the procedure
Recovery runbooks is for whoever will write the step-by-step procedure and the people who will have to follow it under stress. Read it when your recovery knowledge lives in someone’s head, or before you ask a colleague to try your restore steps.
Tabletop exercises is for facilitators who can gather a group for two hours but have no isolated environment to restore into. Read it when you need to test decision-making, communication and hidden dependencies rather than the technology.
After the exercise
After-action review is for the drill lead and for the manager who receives the result. Read it before the drill, so that the evidence you need gets recorded, and afterwards, to turn findings into fixes that are verified.
About the site
About ITDrill says what the site is and, as importantly, what it is not. Contact explains what a message can usefully be about and what must never be sent. Privacy describes what the site does with information. Tools explains the kind of tool the planner is.