Testing Your Backups

This Thursday we’re going to go through the process of testing your backup by restoring a file from it. This process works for cloud backups, tape backups, backups to USB drives or whatever form of backup you are using.

Why do this?

This data that you’re backing up, it must be important or you wouldn’t be backing it up in the first place. Maybe it’s business documents, your customer files or database, or important financial information. Whatever it is, it’s something you’d like back if the original file should somehow disappear or be unavailable.
All we are doing is exactly that – making sure that file is available.

But My Backup is Successful!

Is it? How do you know?
Let me tell you a story of a company that faithfully backed up every night to tape. They tested the backup tape by restoring a file and then when they were assured the data was valid they put the backup tapes in a locked safe, completely protected.
Then one day the server crashed. They were not worried and went to their backup tapes in the safe – all of which were completely blank! Everything! What went wrong? It turns out that in the room on the other side of the safe wall was a large magnetic power source. It destroyed every tape in the safe.
What did they do wrong? They tested before storage, not after. They never took a tape out of the safe and tested that.

Never Assume

Let’s be sure. Testing a restore is easy and is not time consuming. If you’ve never done one before then you may need to look up the steps (We’ll show you how to do one with CloudPockets) but isn’t your data worth 1/2 hour of your time?

Let’s get ready and make sure that those backed up files are ready and available to you whenever you might need them. Nobody likes to think about disasters, but it will be much less of a disaster if your critical business data has been preserved.