checklist-en.md

1. Manage the client's expectations.

• Make sure the client knows from the start that critical incidents are natural.
• Disclose your backup plan and recovery process.

2. Assess the severity of the situation:

• What happened, who was affected and what's the impact of the issue?

3. Declare an incident:

• Does the issue have impact and complexity that requires a team effort?

4. Assign clear responsibilities for the team:

• Who will communicate the client?
• Who will fix the issue?
• Who will work on the restoration?

5. Have a transparency policy:

• Notify the client and take responsibility as a team.

6. Define a recovery and data restoration plan:

• Identify the bug causing the incident and issue a hotfix.
• Identify the latest backup with valid data.
• Define the time-frame not covered by the backup.
• Retrace the state of the system during the time-frame not covered by the backup.
• Write data restoration scripts.
• Specify all commands and steps required for the restoration.

7. Execute the plan while providing rapid status updates:

• Test the restoration locally.
• Backup the data.
• Restore the lost data.
• Identify the data that could not be recovered.
• Disclose the lost data to the client.

8. Write an incident postmortem with the team:

• What happened?
• Why the incident occurred?
• What was the resolution? And how effective?
• What would the team do differently?
• What problems did the team encounter?
• What actions will be taken to make sure the incident doesn’t happen again?

9. Update existing practices:

• Take time after the incident to read the postmortem and update what was necessary.