Backup and recovery
A backup you haven't restored is only a hope
Many businesses discover their backups do not work on the worst possible day: the day they need them.
1 min readExplainer
The short version
Backups fail quietly. The only way to know yours work is to restore from them on a schedule.
How backups fail
Backups rarely fail loudly. More often:
- A job has been failing for months, and the warning emails go to someone who left.
- The backup runs, but misses a new server or folder added since it was set up.
- Files are there, but a database is corrupt or cannot be started.
- Everything is technically fine, but restoring takes four days when the business can manage one.
What testing means
- Daily: check that every backup job ran and look into any failure.
- Regularly: restore real files and confirm they open.
- On a schedule: restore a whole system, start it and confirm it works, and time how long it took.
What you learn
A test tells you whether your data comes back, how long it takes and what steps nobody wrote down. That is far better learned on a quiet Tuesday than during an outage.
Questions to ask
- When was the last test restore, and what was restored?
- Who reviews failed backup jobs, and how quickly?
- How long would it take to restore your most important system?
Talk to us about your technology
Tell us what you run today and what is getting in the way. We will get back to you about how we can help.