What evidence do auditors commonly ask for on A.3.24 Information backup?

Backup and restoration policy covering PII and the erasure of PII in backups; Customer information on backup limits and capabilities; Restoration procedure and restoration log with responsible person and PII restored; Evidence of backup testing at the frequency the jurisdiction requires.

What is the most common gap auditors find on A.3.24?

PII erased from live systems and retained indefinitely in backups

ISO/IEC 27701:2025 · Annex A Table A.3 information security controls with PII-specific guidance

`A.3.24` Information backup

The organization shall keep a policy covering how PII is backed up, recovered and restored, together with any contractual or legal obligations to erase PII that sits in backups. It shall make customers aware of what the service does not cover on backup and, where it expressly offers backup and restore, describe clearly what it can do for PII. It shall be able to show that it meets any local rules on how often backups run, how they are tested and how recovery works. After a restore, it shall bring the PII to a condition in which its integrity can be relied on, or in which errors and gaps are found and corrected, which may mean involving the PII principal. It shall maintain a restoration procedure and a record of each restoration of PII naming at minimum who was responsible and what PII was restored, including any content a jurisdiction prescribes for that record. Backup copies stored with a subcontractor are governed by the supplier controls.

Source: ISO/IEC 27701:2025, A.3.24. The statement above is our statement of the clause, read from the published text and cited so you can check it against the official text, not the instrument verbatim. Open ISO/IEC 27701:2025 in the compliance library.

artefacts

held by a system

at each review

easy

to go live

Backup / DR tooling

where the evidence lives

teal = a system already holds it · olive = produced at each review. To go live: easy when half or more of the artefacts are already held by a system, moderate from a quarter to a half, hard below a quarter.

These are the artefacts auditors commonly ask for on this requirement, our guidance rather than text from the standard. Your assessor decides what is sufficient in your context, and asks for samples across the period when a report covers one.

system holds itEvidence a system already holds

Restoration procedure and restoration log with responsible person and PII restored · Backup / DR tooling
Evidence of backup testing at the frequency the jurisdiction requires · Backup / DR tooling

periodic reviewEvidence produced at each review

none for this control

governing documentDocuments that govern the control

Backup and restoration policy covering PII and the erasure of PII in backups · Policy repository / GRC workspace
Customer information on backup limits and capabilities · Policy repository / GRC workspace

First move

Automate the pull from your Backup / DR tooling. Backup job success history and restore-test logs from the backup platform.

Common gaps auditors find

PII erased from live systems and retained indefinitely in backups
Restoration performed with no log of who restored what
Restored data never checked for integrity against the individual's current record

Do this for your whole sheet

Paste the rows you run your controls from and get this mapping for every control at once, with the periodic-review ones flagged and a first move per row. No account for the first run.

Build my evidence sheet

A.3.23 Secure authentication · A.3.25 Logging