Your Business Has a Backup. But Can You Actually Recover from It?

Techpiormm

2 days ago

2 min read

Having a Backup Doesn't Mean You're Prepared

What Can Go Wrong with a Backup?

The Real Test Is Recovery

Backup verification, meaning confirming that jobs ran and completed, is a good start. It tells you the copy was made. It doesn't tell you the copy works.

Backup recovery testing answers the more important question: can we actually get our data back, and is it usable when we do?

Recovery tests can start small and scale up:

Restoring an individual file. Pick a real document, delete it from a test location, and restore it from backup. This confirms the basics.
Restoring a folder. Recover a shared department folder and check that the structure and permissions look right.
Restoring a system. Bring back a server or workstation in a test environment. This shows how long it really takes, which is often longer than people guess.
Testing application recovery. Restoring a server doesn't help if your accounting, practice management, or line-of-business software won't run afterwards. Confirm the application and its database come back in working order.
Simulating major data loss or ransomware. Walk through what you would do if the main file server were unusable. Which backup would you use? Is it clean? Who makes decisions?
Confirming the data is usable. Open the recovered files. A restored database that won't open, or blank documents, count as failed restores.