Why your backups probably won't restore (and how to find out before it matters)
Most small businesses have a backup. Far fewer have ever tested one. Here's a 15-minute check you can do this week.
Nearly every business we assess has some kind of backup. A USB drive, a cloud sync, a server backup job that emails a green “success” every night. Very few have ever restored a file from it, and almost none have tried restoring a whole server.
A backup that has never been restored is a hope, not a plan.
The three questions
- When did the last backup finish? A job that ran is different from a job that finished. Open the backup software and read the log itself. The summary email only tells you the job started.
- Can you open a file from it right now? Pick a document from last week and restore it to a different folder. If that takes more than 15 minutes or you don’t know how, that’s your answer.
- What’s not in it? Microsoft doesn’t back up your 365 mailboxes or SharePoint for you. Your POS database, your accounting file, and the QuickBooks company file on someone’s desktop may not be covered either.
What we do differently
For managed clients we test restores on a schedule, and the result goes in the monthly report. If a restore fails, we find out during a scheduled test and fix it before anyone needs that backup for real.
If you’d like a second set of eyes on your current backups, that’s part of our free assessment.