Three questions about your backups you should be able to answer

When I start working with a new company I almost always ask the same three questions about their backups. They are simple questions, but it is rare to get a clear answer to all three.

1. What is actually being backed up?

Most people answer "everything". Dig into it and a different picture usually emerges: the file share is backed up but the database is not, or the server is covered but the laptops people actually work on are not.

Start by listing the systems the business could not operate without for a week. Then check, one by one, whether each is in the backup. The list is usually short — and there is usually something on it that is missing.

2. How much could you afford to lose?

A backup that runs once a night means that in the worst case you lose a full working day. For some businesses that is perfectly acceptable. For others — a shop, an accounting firm mid-filing-season — it is not.

This is not a technical decision, it is a business one. The question is simply: how much work can you lose without it hurting? The answer determines how often the backup should run.

3. When was a backup last restored?

This is the question that matters most, and the one that most rarely gets a good answer.

A backup that has never been restored is not a backup, it is an assumption. There are plenty of ways backups fail silently: the storage fills up, credentials expire, a new folder never gets included, an encryption key goes missing.

The only way to know a backup works is to restore from it — and to keep doing that on a schedule, not just once when the system was first set up.

If you are not sure

That is exactly the reason to look into it. Reviewing a backup setup usually takes an hour or two, and what comes out of it is a clear list of what is fine and what needs work.

If you would like to go through where you stand, get in touch.