29/07/2026
Two questions for anyone looking after a charity database.
How recent is your last clean backup? And how long would a restore actually take?
Most of us can answer the first one roughly. Very few can answer the second, because it has never needed answering on an ordinary day. It is a much harder question to face when something has been failing quietly for three days.
A response plan is not a big project. It is a handful of decisions made in advance, while everyone is still calm.
Our five step incident response plan for database managers:
https://actuallydataanalytics.com/the-database-managers-incident-response-plan/