Backup & Recovery
It's World Backup Day. Don't make a backup — test one.
It’s World Backup Day, so the internet will spend today telling you to back up your data.
Reasonable advice, and largely wasted — because most businesses reading it already have a backup. What they don’t have is any evidence that it works.
So ignore the advice. Do this instead: restore something.
The one-hour test
- Pick a real file. Not a test document you created this morning. Something from a client folder, three months old, that you’d genuinely miss.
- Restore it from the backup — not from the trash, not from the cloud sync. From the actual backup.
- Open it. Not the file name. The file. Confirm the contents are real.
- Now restore a whole folder, and time it.
- Write that number down. That is your recovery time. It is the only backup number that means anything.
What people find when they finally test
We’ve done this with businesses who were entirely confident. The usual discoveries:
- The backup has been silently excluding a folder for eleven months.
- It only covers one machine — and the important work lives on another.
- Restoring “everything” would take four days, which the business would not survive.
- Nobody knows the login to the backup system. The person who set it up has left.
- It backs up to a drive plugged into the same computer — which ransomware would encrypt along with everything else.
Every one of those is invisible until the day you try. And nobody tries on a calm day.
The uncomfortable truth
Backups fail silently by design. They report success. They send you a green tick. They are, in a quiet way, optimized to make you stop paying attention.
The only thing that converts a backup from a belief into a fact is a restore. An untested backup isn’t a backup. It’s a hope with a scheduling feature.
Today’s the day. Restore one file. It takes ten minutes and it tells you the truth.
Want to know where you actually stand? We do free, no-pressure security checks for small businesses across the East Bay — backups, accounts, defenses. We tell you plainly what to fix first.
World Backup Day is observed annually on March 31.