Which role is primarily responsible for restoring services from backups during an incident?

• A. On-call engineer
• B. Incident Manager
• C. SME
• D. Backup/Recovery lead

Answer: (D)

Restoring services from backups during an incident relies on someone who can own and orchestrate the entire recovery workflow, ensuring the right backup points are used, the restore steps are executed correctly, and services are brought back online within the recovery targets. The Backup/Recovery lead fits this role best because they maintain the restore runbooks, understand backup retention and dependencies, and coordinate across teams to validate data integrity and service readiness. They oversee the end-to-end process from selecting the restore point to confirming that systems are operational and handed off to production.

An on-call engineer handles hands-on fixes and immediate technical responses to issues, but the focus is usually narrower to individual components rather than the full restoration across the environment. The Incident Manager steers the overall incident response—severity, communications, and prioritization—but does not perform the actual restoration work. A subject matter expert contributes deep knowledge for a specific system, yet does not own the comprehensive recovery workflow.