Is your backup actually working? The only real test is asking for something back.
A backup is a strange thing to own. You pay for it every month, it sits quietly in the corner, and its main job, for years at a time, is to make you feel better.
That’s fine, right up until the morning you need it. Which is why the question isn’t “do we have a backup?” Almost everyone does. The question is “have we ever got anything back from it?”
A green tick tells you something ran. It doesn’t tell you anything will come back.
Three things that feel like backups
The files that sync to the cloud. Sync is brilliant for working from anywhere. It’s also very obedient. Delete a folder, or let ransomware scramble it, and it will faithfully copy that change to every device you own. Some services let you get deleted files back for a while, but that’s a safety net, not a backup.
The USB drive that’s plugged in all the time. If something nasty can reach your computer, it can usually reach the drive sitting next to it. Government guidance is to keep backups tested and stored separately from your main systems. “Separately” doesn’t mean “on the same desk”.
“The IT company looks after it.” Possibly. But if nobody can tell you what’s backed up, where it goes and when anyone last got something back, you don’t have a backup. You have a hope with a monthly fee.
Five quiet checks for this week
None of these needs technical knowledge. Most take a phone call.
1. What’s actually in it?
Write down what you’d miss if it vanished tomorrow: the accounts file, the shared drive, email, the server, the job photos, that one spreadsheet the whole business secretly runs on. Then ask whether each one is in the backup. The gaps are usually the newest things: the laptop you bought in March, the software you moved to last year.
2. When did it last finish?
Look at the date, not the colour of the light. A backup that last finished three weeks ago still counts as “a backup”. It’s just a three-week-old one.
3. Where does the copy live?
A good rule of thumb is 3-2-1: three copies of your data, on two different kinds of storage, with one copy somewhere other than the office. A box under the same desk won’t help much after a break-in, a fire or a wet season that gets inside. Ask too whether the off-site copy is encrypted, and which country it’s in.
4. Ask for one file back
This is the one that matters. Pick a file you changed last week and ask for the version from a few days earlier, put back into a different folder so nothing gets overwritten. If it comes back without fuss, lovely. If there’s a long pause and someone says “let me check”, you’ve just learnt the most useful thing about your backup, on a quiet Tuesday instead of a terrible Monday.
5. How long would everything take?
One file is quick. A whole computer or server can take hours, sometimes longer. Ask for a rough number. If the answer is “a couple of days” and the business can’t run for a couple of days, it’s far better to find that out over a coffee than in a crisis.
A few questions any good IT company will happily answer
-
Who checks that the backups ran?
-
When did someone last get files back, and how long did it take?
-
How far back can we go? A day? A year?
-
Is the off-site copy encrypted, and is it kept in Australia?
-
If the office was out of action tonight, what would we do on Monday morning?
If those questions make anyone uncomfortable, that’s an answer too.
How we do it
We don’t think you should have to take anyone’s word for it, including ours. So for our clients, backup alert emails come straight to you. If a backup fails, you hear about it directly, not third-hand weeks later. If you’d rather not think about backups at all, we can manage them fully for you.
For managed IT clients, backups are encrypted and kept in Australia, and we keep an eye on drive health and disk space, so a tired drive or a full disk gets dealt with before it takes your files with it.
What nobody can honestly offer is a backup that can’t fail. Drives wear out, settings drift, new computers arrive without anyone mentioning it. That’s why the checking matters more than the software.
More on data backup, backup and disaster recovery, setting up a 3-2-1 backup and server and NAS monitoring.
Tell us what’s bugging you.
Not sure what your backup is actually doing? Ring Kelly or Carisa and tell us what you’ve got. We’ll tell you plainly whether it’s doing its job, even if the answer is “yes, leave it alone”.
Busy? We'll ring you.
Leave your number and tell us what's not working. We'll take it from there.