40% of the customers in Leaseweb’s 2026 survey of Acronis users have already needed to restore from backup. The next question is how long that restore takes. A timed restore test answers it in an afternoon, before an outage forces the answer.
TL;DR
The only way to know your recovery time is to measure it, and a four-step test does that in an afternoon. Restore your most critical workload into an isolated test VM. Time it until the application serves correct data. Compare the result with your target recovery time. Repeat each quarter with a different workload.
What our customers told us
We also asked customers how confident they are that they could recover within 24 hours, because confidence is something we can help build. Most are still working toward full confidence, and that’s expected: the 60% who have never needed to restore haven’t had a reason to measure their recovery time yet. A restore test gives them that number.
Some teams fill the confidence gap with redundancy. RAID keeps a server running when one disk fails. High availability keeps a service running when a node fails. Neither one brings back a table someone dropped an hour ago or files encrypted by ransomware. A restore from backup does, and a restore test tells you how long it takes.
Which tier are you actually in?
Most recovery plans sort workloads into tiers by how fast they need to come back (RTO) and how much data you can afford to lose (RPO). These example targets are a starting point:
| Tier | Example RTO | Example RPO | Typical workloads |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mission-critical | ≤15 min | Near-zero | Payment systems, customer-facing databases |
| Important | ~4 hours | ~2 hours | Internal business applications |
| Low priority | 8–24 hours | ~4 hours | Reporting and internal tools |
| Nightly backup only | 24+ hours | 24 hours | File shares and archives that rarely change |
Example targets. Set your own for each workload.
The top row needs a different mechanism from the other three. Continuous Data Protection (CDP) in Acronis on Leaseweb records changes from critical applications as they happen, between scheduled backups. For example: a SaaS company’s tenant database corrupts at 4 PM, and the last nightly backup ran at midnight. On the nightly schedule, 16 hours of customer data is gone. With CDP running, it’s roughly 30 seconds.
Combine CDP with a backup location close to your servers. CDP keeps your newest restore point seconds old, and a nearby Acronis data center shortens the restore itself. Leaseweb customers choose which Acronis data center holds their backups. Since 1997, we’ve built infrastructure so customers decide where their data lives. For backup, that decision also sets how fast it comes back.
Most IT teams can name the tier they’re supposed to deliver. A timed restore of one critical workload shows which row they actually land in.
What backup recovery testing reveals
Measured recovery times are often slower than teams expect. In Kaseya’s 2025 State of Backup and Recovery report, six in ten IT professionals believed they could recover critical systems in under a day, and 35% could [1].
A restore test turns that belief into a number, before an outage does.
How to run your first recovery test
Backup recovery testing works best as a small routine you repeat. Pick the workload you’d need back first, such as your production database or customer-facing application. Then:
- Restore its most recent backup into an isolated test VM.
- Time it from the moment you start the restore to the moment the application serves correct data.
- Compare that time with the tier you placed the workload in above.
- Write down what slowed you down, and test a different workload next quarter.
Plan an afternoon for the first run. It’s the same quarterly routine we recommend in our guide to backup strategy.
If you run Acronis on Leaseweb, Leaseweb support can help with configuring CDP for the workloads that belong in the top tier, and with best-practice advice. For the attack side of this story, read our piece on ransomware backup attacks.
About the survey: We run this survey to understand how customers use Acronis on Leaseweb and where we can help them get more out of it. Leaseweb surveyed customers using Acronis Cyber Protect on Leaseweb in June 2026. Between 40 and 43 customers answered each question. With a sample this size, the results describe this group of Leaseweb customers and aren’t statistically representative of all backup users.