Recovery Glossary

Browse 27 recovery terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

27 Recovery Terms

Anti-Ransomware
Built to prevent, detect, or limit ransomware behavior such as mass encryption, malicious persistence, or backup tampering. Anti-ransomware capabilities often...
Backup Strategy
The plan for how data and systems are backed up, retained, validated, and restored to meet recovery goals. A strong backup strategy considers frequency, scope,...
Boot Loop
A failure mode where a device repeatedly starts and restarts without successfully completing the boot process, often due to corrupted firmware, incompatible...
Code Rescue
A focused effort to save a failing, abandoned, or dangerously unstable system before it causes more damage. In engineering slang, code rescue is what happens...
Cooldown Sprint
A lighter sprint scheduled after an intense push, used for cleanup, debt work, and recovery.
Data Backup Security
The protection of backup data and backup systems so they cannot be stolen, encrypted by attackers, silently corrupted, or misused during recovery. It includes...
Data Recovery
The process of restoring lost, deleted, damaged, or inaccessible data from backups, replicas, or underlying media. In security incidents, recovery quality...
File Carving
A forensic technique for recovering files or file fragments from raw storage by recognizing known headers, footers, and structural patterns even when...
Hard Reset
A full reset that restarts a device, process, or situation more aggressively than a normal soft restart, often by clearing state or forcing reinitialization....
Incident Recovery
The phase of incident response focused on safely restoring systems, data, and normal operations after containment and cleanup. Good incident recovery includes...
Key Recovery
The process of restoring access to encrypted data or services by recovering a lost, escrowed, backed-up, or split cryptographic key. Key recovery procedures...
Nuke and Pave
A recovery strategy where you wipe a broken system entirely and rebuild it cleanly instead of trying to repair it in place. It is common when a system is too...
Reboot
To restart a system, device, service, or by extension a stalled effort so it begins again from a clean state. In tech culture it is both a literal operations...
Recovery Key
A backup or alternate cryptographic key that allows access to encrypted data or systems when the normal authentication path is unavailable. Recovery keys are...
Restore Point
A saved system state that can be returned to later in order to recover from corruption, failed updates, or some classes of compromise. Restore points are...
Rollback
Rollback is the process of reverting a system, database, or deployment to a previous known-good state after a failed update, bug, or incident. In database...
RPO
Short for recovery point objective, the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time after an incident or outage. RPO helps determine backup...
RTO
Short for recovery time objective, the maximum acceptable time a system or service can remain unavailable after a disruption. RTO is used in continuity...
Safe Mode
A reduced or constrained operating mode used to keep a system functioning more safely while problems are investigated. In engineering slang, safe mode trades...
Save Point
A state from which recovery can resume without losing everything, borrowed from video-game logic. In engineering slang, save points are the intermediate...
Self-Healing
Describing systems that can detect and recover from certain failures automatically. In engineering slang, self-healing is a desirable property, though people...
Transaction Log
An append-only, sequential record of every write operation performed on a database, written to disk before the actual data pages are modified (write-ahead...
Turnaround
A major shift that moves a struggling business, product, or metric from decline toward recovery and healthier performance. Turnarounds require more than...
Up and Running
Operational and functioning well enough to use. In engineering slang, getting something up and running can mean true readiness or merely the minimum state...
WAL
Write-Ahead Log — a technique where all modifications are written to a sequential log file before being applied to the actual database pages. If the database...
WAL Replay
The crash recovery process where a database reads its write-ahead log from the last checkpoint and re-applies committed transactions that weren't yet written...
Warm Boot
A restart that happens without a full cold start of the whole environment. In engineering slang, warm boots are often preferred when you want to recover...

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