I’m going to stay with the backup theme for another week, and look at some of the problems businesses face once they’ve already decided what sort of backup device they’re going to use. Specifically, now that you have a backup, does it work? This is a question that many companies never ask themselves, or their tech support provider, and it’s a critical mistake.

Here’s why.

Imaging a scenario where your laptop crashes. It’s a pretty serious failure, and the hard drive needs to be replaced, which means that all data on the drive is lost. That’s okay though, because you’ve been listening to your technical support provider, and you’ve been doing regular backups of your email and some other important data. So you try to restore the data from backup and – it fails. Going to an older backup doesn’t help… no matter what you try, the most recent data you can get your hands on is over 2 years old. Now what?

When you install a new alarm, many companies ask you run to a test through the system every so often to make sure it reports correctly. You test your smoke detectors regularly to make sure they’re still working. You take your vehicle to be serviced fairly frequently, regardless of whether or not something is broken.
So why do businesses not test their backups?

If a company has regular data losses, for example through human error, then you probably know that your backups work, because someone is likely restoring files on a fairly regular basis. For everyone else a good rule of thumb is to test your backups twice per year. I like to use the clock change rule, the same as for my home’s smoke detectors, as an indicator that it’s time to schedule a backup test.

Actually doing the testing is an easy process. Simply pick a file at random and rename it from .whatever to .old (e.g. rename doc1.xls to doc1.old). Then run through the file restore process in place at your organization, and check the file that’s restored to see if it opens properly.

The steps you’ll need to take to restore the file will depend on what backup strategy and method you’re using. So be sure to check with your technical support provider to ensure that all that precious information of yours is just as safe as you hope it is. Before you find out the hard way that it isn’t.