Backup and disaster recovery get sold, discussed and budgeted for as though they're the same thing with different price tags. They solve different problems, and a business that has only solved one of them usually does not find out until the day it needed the other.
Backup protects against data loss: a corrupted file, a deleted mailbox, an accidental overwrite. Restoring from backup gets your data back, but it can take hours or days, and it typically restores files and systems in isolation rather than a fully operational environment. Disaster recovery protects against downtime: it is a plan and the supporting infrastructure to bring an entire operational environment (servers, applications, network configuration, and the data itself) back online, often within a much tighter window than a backup restore alone would allow.
On one recovery exercise, a business had nightly backups of its file and SQL servers, but the scenario encrypted the domain controllers first, so restoring the servers alone would have got nowhere: nothing could authenticate. The recovery plan was rewritten to bring identity back first, in an isolated network, before anything that depended on it.
The practical failure mode looks like this: a business has diligent nightly backups, experiences a server failure, and discovers that restoring those backups onto replacement infrastructure, reconfiguring the network, and getting applications running again takes three days, because nobody had planned or tested the recovery half of the equation, only the backup half.
For most estates, a backup-led approach with explicit disaster-recovery elements is a reasonable starting point, but the size of that gap should be a deliberate decision, not a default born from only ever having budgeted for backup software.
The most useful question to ask about either is not "do we have backups" but "when did we last restore from them, and how long did it take." A backup that has never been test-restored is a hypothesis, not a safety net.
Want recovery you have tested? Backup and disaster recovery
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