Recovery Plan

Overview

The plan identifies critical accounts, keys, systems, providers, personnel, dependencies, and recovery priorities. It should cover device loss, credential exposure, signer unavailability, corrupted data, infrastructure outage, provider failure, and unauthorized transactions.

Different incidents require different actions. Restoring a backup may be correct after hardware failure but unsafe after compromise. The plan therefore needs decision points, trusted communication, safe destinations, alternate signers, data sources, and conditions for suspending normal transfers.

Named owners, approval authority, secure copies, version control, and training are essential. Exercises should measure actual restoration time, state accuracy, key usability, and reconciliation. After activation, teams should verify balances and pending transactions, rotate compromised authority, communicate appropriately, and record lessons. The plan must change when architecture or personnel changes.

Recovery Plan differs from ordinary retry or customer support because it restores authority after a control failure. For example, reinstalling an application is not successful recovery until the correct accounts, networks, balances, policies, and transaction history are reproduced and compromised authority can no longer act.

The scope of Recovery Plan should identify the protected wallet, key, account, service, or business process; the triggering failure; who may declare the incident; which identity and entitlement evidence is required; and the recovery point and recovery time objectives that govern restoration.

For Recovery Plan, important risks include fraudulent recovery requests, guardian collusion, unavailable shares, outdated backups, compromised cloud accounts, missing derivation metadata, untested procedures, and simultaneous loss of primary and backup systems. For Recovery Plan, independent storage and periodic exercises reduce correlated failure but introduce their own custody obligations.