Backups are one of the most critical components of any disaster recovery (DR) strategy. Disaster recovery focuses on restoring systems, data, and operations after a disruptive event such as a cyberattack, natural disaster, hardware failure, or human error. Without reliable backups, recovery may be impossible or severely delayed.

Backups ensure that critical data can be restored to a known good state, minimizing data loss and downtime. Industry frameworks such as NIST SP 800-34 and ISO/IEC 27031 emphasize backups as a foundational DR control. They support recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs), which define how quickly systems must be restored and how much data loss isacceptable.

While routers, laptops, and firewalls are important infrastructure components, they can typically be replaced or reconfigured. Lost or corrupted data, however, may be irreplaceable without backups. Best practices include maintaining regular, automated backups, storing them offsite or in the cloud, and protecting them from ransomware using immutable or offline storage. Testing backups regularly is also essential to ensure they are usable during an actual disaster.