Recoverability

Recoverability is the degree to which, in the event of an interruption or a failure, a system or product can recover the data directly affected and re-establish its desired state. ISO/IEC 25010 classes it as a sub-characteristic of reliability, alongside maturity, availability, and fault tolerance.

A recoverable system detects that it has failed, or that data has been lost or corrupted, and restores itself — or is restored — to a known-good state within an acceptable time, whether through a replay of transactions, a restore from backup, or a resynchronization from a redundant copy. This is distinct from fault tolerance, which is about continuing to operate despite a fault. Recoverability is about what happens once a fault has already caused a failure.

Recoverability is usually verified through recovery testing, and is closely related to, though narrower than, disaster recovery, which covers the policies and procedures for restoring an entire system’s operations after a major disruptive event.