Backup & Recovery
It's World Backup Day. Test your backup.
It’s World Backup Day, so the internet will spend today telling you to back up your data.
Reasonable advice, but most businesses reading it already have a backup. What they lack is any evidence that it works.
So do this instead: restore something.
The one-hour test
- Pick a real file. Choose something from a client folder, about three months old, that you’d miss. Skip the test document you made this morning.
- Restore it from the backup itself, not from the trash or the cloud sync.
- Open it and check that the contents are all there.
- Now restore a whole folder, and time it.
- Write that number down. That’s your recovery time, and it’s the backup number that matters.
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.
Each of those stays hidden until the day you try, and nobody tries on a calm day.
Why backups lull you
Backups fail silently. They report success and send you a green tick, and over time that teaches you to stop paying attention.
Only a restore turns a backup from a belief into a fact. Until then, an untested backup is a hope with a scheduling feature.
Restore one file today. It takes ten minutes and 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, covering backups, accounts and defenses. We tell you plainly what to fix first.
World Backup Day is observed annually on March 31.