Quarterly recovery drill. Backup job green for four months. Restore executes cleanly — data intact, VM boots, database service starts. The application fails on the first transaction. Three hours disappear into backup triage before anyone checks the environment. The backup was not the problem. It never was. This is recovery configuration drift — and it belongs to the same class of data protection failure where the protection plane reports success and the recovery plane produces nothing useful. What the Drill Was Testing (and What It Wasn't) The drill validated backup integrity and restore mechanics — the protection plane. It did not validate environment state — the recovery plane. Four months of silent drift had accumulated between the backup capture point and the recovery target. The backup job reported green throughout. Nothing surfaced the gap until the restore ran into an environment that had moved on. Three drift vectors accumulated silently over those four months. Each individually invisible.…