What is Recovery Testing and what are its features.

Recovery testing tells how well an application is able to recover from a crash, hardware failure. Recovery testing should not be confused with reliability testing, which tries to discover the specific point at which failure occurs.
- Recovery is ability to restart the operation after integrity of application is lost.
- The time taken to recover depends upon the number of restart points, volume of application, training and skill of people conducting recovery activities and the
tools available for recovery.
- Recovery testing ensures that the operations can be continued after a disaster.
- Recovery testing verifies recovery process and effectiveness of recovery process.
- In recovery testing, adequate back up data is preserved and kept in secure location.
- Recovery procedures are documented.
- Recovery personnel have been assigned and trained.
- Recovery tools have been developed and are available.

To use recovery testing, procedures, methods, tools and techniques are assessed to evaluate the adequacy. Recovery testing can be done by introducing a failure in the system and check whether the system is able to recover. A simulated disaster is usually performed on one aspect of application system. Recovery testing should be carried for one segment and then on the other segment when there are many failures.

Recovery testing is used when the continuity of the system is needed inorder for system to perform or function properly.User estimates the losses, time span to carry out recovery testing. Recovery testing is done by system analysts, testing professionals and management personnel.